Breaking Point
by clouisewise
Summary: With the team so focused on keeping Shaw safe after her cover was blown, it was almost too easy for Samaritan to grab a completely different member of the team. What happens when Shaw is forced to look at how she feels for Root in the wake of the hacker's kidnapping by none other than Martine? Set after Shaw's cover is blown but I'm still pretending 4x11 never happened. 0:)
1. Chapter 1

Shaw will argue that she doesn't have many pet peeves.

(Which, anyone who knows her knows is a complete and utter lie, but they also know how pointless it is to argue the fact with her; she is as stubborn as she can be delusional, it seems.)

One of her biggest pet peeves however, and she will be the first to tell you, is radio silence. Especially in the midst of a mission, or in the important aftermath in which her and her little team of misfits - mostly Finch and more recently Root, in the safety of the subway surrounded by computers or off doing something more than likely ridiculous, respectfully - are trying to tie up lose ends and cover any of the tracks they may have left behind. In the wake of Samaritan's awakening, and Shaw's cover identity being blown in the worst way, they have had to be extra careful. Shaw has since been allowed to partake in a select few missions, so long as she follows the shadow map and maintains some sort of contact with Root. As annoying as that fact is, it's her only proxy to the Machine, and she wouldn't dare operate without either of their watchful eyes at this point.

Which is why, at this exact moment, standing in the middle of a sidewalk without further direction from anyone and at the end of the known black-out area she's been operating in since early that morning, Shaw is berating Reese with her long list reasons why radio silence bothers her so.

"I would even take her stupid innuendos over fucking _nothing_ at this point. Do you know what I mean?"

"I don't know what you want me to do Shaw", his voice comes over the line for the first time since his disgruntled partner in crime started ranting. He sounds tired, and bored, and Shaw almost feels bad for calling him up to do nothing short of complain._ Almost_. "Finch is at a conference out of state and I'm working a case. It would be hours before I would be able to do_ anything_ remotely useful."

As if to emphasize the point, Fusco's comm link opened up as well and all she heard at first is the rustling sound she knew all too well to be the opening of a bag of chips before loud crunching came through her earpiece. She winced, instantly irritated.

"Sorry, Shaw," the detective said between loud bites, "but if I let boy wonder here miss another day of work the captain will have both our asses."

She rolled her eyes in an unseen response and bit back the many snide remarks she had on the tip of her tongue, instead waiting for Reese to continue.

"I thought Root was running point on this one, Shaw?"

"She _was_. But she was afraid her position had been compromised and said she would get back to me in 30 when she relocated. But that was an hour ago now and if I'm being completely honest I'm about to say fuck this shadow map and go to the bar across the street from me."

The other lines were silent, but Shaw could almost hear the wheels in John's brain turning. She almost knows what he's going to say before he actually says it.

"So you're telling me", he started slowly, "that you haven't heard anything from Root in an hour and your primary concern is getting a drink?"

"Yes?"

Reese sighed, long and forlorn, and Shaw imagined the way he closes his eyes with a little shake of his head like she has seen him do in her direction what has to be hundreds of times before by this point.

"Maybe you should go check on her?", he asked, but it's less of a suggestion and more of a statement.

"Why? Root can take care of herself. She left the subway with _six_ guns, Reese. Normally I would admire her tenacity but really, who needs six guns to run _technical interference_ and_ recon_ from an _abandoned building_ two miles away? That's more firepower than_ I_ brought!"

Shaw was about to continue, add on a quick "she's fine" (mostly for her own comfort) when more loud crunching came through, drowning her out, signalling Fusco reopened his line.

"Listen, I dislike CocoaPuffs as much as the next guy - as _most_ guys, I imagine -", Shaw smirked at that, "but if there's one thing that lady is, it's efficient. Crazy, without a doubt, but definitely efficient. She probably brought those guns because she was expecting trouble, Shaw. Which probably means-"

"You should really go check on her", Reese finished for him quickly, and in the background she could hear the crackling of the police radio. "We've got to go for now. Let us know if you need anything."

With that, the other two lines close, leaving Shaw with the complete radio silence that started this whole thing. She threw her head back and groaned, annoyed but knowing she couldn't leave Root in a dangerous situation if that is indeed what she had stumbled in to.

And knowing Root, she probably had.

Shaw turned around and started off in the direction of the building Root had been set up in earlier, muttering to herself about the nice glass of whiskey she missed out on at the bar across the street.

* * *

The building that Root had been staking out in was an old apartment building south of the warehouse Shaw had been in that was slotted for demolition later this week; it was vacant, completely and wholly, without so much as wallpaper on the walls or a single sign that once, however long ago, people had lived here. Shaw stepped over drywall and fallen beams from more decrepit parts of the building that had fallen and are now littering the hallways. Root had been on the sixth floor, in the 9th room in from the right, and Shaw only remembered because of the vulgar jokes the hacker had been making about '69' all the way up until she had heard gunfire from Shaw's end of the comm link.

Who knew Root's terrible jokes might one day save her life?, Shaw thought. She decided almost instantly to make sure Root never found out that_ that_ was how she found the room she'd been in so quickly.

Not having to clear every room made Shaw's search much easier, and she took the steps two at a time all the way up to the sixth floor. She drew her gun as she neared the door to the room Root had been in, and took one deep breath before letting instincts take over - she kicked the door in, leveling her gun quickly and doing a scan of the small studio apartment before realizing no one was there. She lowered the gun but didn't replace it in the holster she was wearing (at John's behest - "What's the good of just stuffing in your waistband?", he had argued, and she stared at him blankly but roughly snatched the holster from his outstretched hand anyways), letting her arm fall to her side as she tried to make sense of the state of the room.

There was a broken laptop in the middle of the room, no doubt Root's, a gunshot through the screen. And a broken stool just beyond that, and next to it a knocked over bowl of cereal. CocoaPuffs, Shaw noted, and she would have laughed at the irony if she didn't take a step forward towards said bowl and almost slip on the cheap linoleum flooring. Frowning, she looked down, and noticed for the first time in the dimly-lit room that there was an alarming amount of blood on the floor of the room. Some of it in sprays, the pattern a heavy blow would leave behind, some of it in small puddles that Shaw knew all too well to be almost indicative of gunshot wounds.

Swallowing thickly, anger tinged with an unfamiliar feeling rising in her chest, Shaw pressed her earpiece to open a line with John.

"We have a problem."

* * *

Reese and Fusco arrived just short of an hour later. Fusco looked as if he was going to vomit as soon as he walked in to the apartment, barely making it past the threshold before excusing himself.

Some homicide detective, Shaw thought bitterly.

Reese walked around the room slowly, too slow for Shaw - who had been in the room too long already, she thought, and was itching to begin chasing down whatever leads they could find as to where Root may be now.

Shaw was acutely aware of the fact that Root had been missing for two hours now, and with the amount of blood she had apparently lost, they were rapidly running out of time to find her.

"Are you sure it's all hers?", Reese asked carefully when she expressed her concerned as he tried in vain to get some information off the laptop that Root had left behind. In addition to being shot it appeared as if someone had manually fried the hard drive - Root, they had all agreed, knowing that more than likely it was Samaritan operatives that found her and she would never risk the rest of their positions by letting her personal laptop fall in to their hands. He looked up at her carefully when she didn't answer right away.

Yes, she wanted to say.

She was sure that it was mostly Root's, if not all of it, because she had searched the room while waiting for the detectives to arrive and found nothing to point towards any kinds of struggle - nothing to point towards Root getting a single shot off, a swing in, any type of defense at all. There were no stray bullet holes in the small room as if there had been a gun fight, just the three directly across from where Root's broken stool would have been set up, in a good grouping about chest-high if she had been sitting in it. (Eye-level if she had been kneeling in front of it with the laptop on the seat, as Shaw had seen her do many times before when she tired of sitting - the thought made Shaw's chest tighten uncomfortably, unfamiliarly, so she tried not to think on it too much.) There was the spilled cereal by the broken stool, with Root's favorite shade of lipstick on the spoon. There was some of Root's hair, longer than Shaw remembered regardless of the fact that she had just seen her that same day, which Shaw sickeningly noted in one of the smaller pools of blood, as if she had been struck in the head. Then, of course, there was the six magazines that had been discarded haphazardly in the corner of the room behind the door - Shaw knew instantly that they belonged to the six missing guns Root had taken that morning, despite the ex-agent's ardent protests that there was such as thing as an unnecessary amount of firepower.

("Since when is more not better?", Root had said with a suggestive wink. When Shaw didn't give in right away, Root pouted. Shaw knew she was done for before Root did. "You said the same thing when I suggested using_ two_, and you thought that was hot. I'm just trying to up the ante."

If only you had actually shot someone with one of your six precious guns, Shaw thought angrily as she checked all the magazines and confirmed what she already knew - that not a single round had been shot off.)

"Almost positive", was all she was able to croak out to Reese, who regarded her seriously for a moment before turning back to fiddle with the broken laptop.

Fusco returned from the hall, where he had said he was going to go check the surrounding rooms, but both of the ex-agents knew he needed a moment to collect himself before returning to them.

"Well there's nothing out there. We all agree this was Samaritan, right?"

Reese and Shaw nodded at him, as if it needed to be confirmed.

"How would they have found her?", Reese asked no one in particular, looking up at the ceiling as if the answers were written on it. "I thought the Machine had her covered. She's been going through identities more quickly than usual lately."

"Maybe that's how? Maybe Samaritan caught on somehow?"

They sat in silence for a moment, none of them knowing quite what their next move was to be. In the dead zone Samaritan wouldn't have been able to find Root without somehow locating her through her laptop or some other electronics, but they all knew Root was smart enough to avoid that issue. They were so lost in their own thoughts that John's cellphone startled all of them, Shaw and Reese each pulling out their guns while Fusco nearly jumped out of his skin.

Taking a deep breath and looking at his team mates apologetically, John lowered his gun and answered the phone.

"Finch", he said with some finality before putting the call on speaker.

"Mr. Reese." He sounded tired, but the happy kind of tired, like a man who had a full day that was finally winding down. Shaw envied him immediately, wondering how different her day might have turned out if she had stayed back in the subway with Bear. "How are things going with the number?"

"The number is fine", Shaw answered for him, sounding more short than she meant to, "but we have a problem."

"Ms. Shaw? What's happened?"

"It's Root", John looked side-long at Shaw, a white-knuckle grip still on her nano and her jaw set tightly - in anger or something else, he wasn't sure. "It looks like Samaritan may have gotten her."

"_Looks_ like? No."

"Shaw's right", Fusco agreed from the corner, his breathing finally normalized. He almost surprised both of the ex-agents, who had almost forgotten he was there. "You should see this place, Glasses. There's blood everywhere. The only thing we found in here is a laptop and that thing's too busted to get anything off of."

There is a long silence on the other line, and Shaw could picture the way Finch's eyes have opened wide, the way his mouth fell open. She clenched her jaw even tighter, and wondered (not for the first time) if Finch is more concerned about Samaritan compromising the position of one them, or about Root herself. She wondered when she became Root's advocate, and shook her head absently as if to shake the thought. Fusco sent her an odd look, but she ignored him.

"Let's convene at the subway. And bring the laptop. Ms. Groves must be found, and _soon_. There's no telling what Samaritan might do to her, and to what means."

Shaw elbowed her way past the boys and out of the room before Finch even finished his sentence.


	2. Chapter 2

Shaw beat everyone else to the subway, even Finch, and was pacing the small space outside the subway car when all three of the boys walked in together. Bear ran from where he was, right on Shaw's heels for the better part of the last 20 minutes since she had gotten there, to greet John with excited barks. He scratched him affectionately, if at all a little absently, behind his ears before sending him to go lay down with a single word.

"Do we have anything?", Shaw asked before Finch had even had the chance to sit down at his computer.

"Patience, Ms. Shaw."

She huffed, resuming her pacing while Harold took the broken laptop from Lionel and examined it. He hooked it up to his mainframe in the subway car and shoo'd both John and Fusco away so he could work without them standing anxiously over him; Fusco had to go pick his son up anyways, so he quickly said his goodbyes and made a hasty exit. No doubt, Shaw's tension was bleeding out in to the room and was tangible by them all at this point. John walked out of the car after saying goodbye to his partner and stretched his arms over his head, watching Shaw with a careful eye. She glared at him without stopping when she felt his eyes on her but he (wisely) kept his face neutral.

"Do you want to talk about it?", he finally said. "Or do you just want to wear a hole in the floor?"

Still glaring, she finally slowed. Why hadn't she checked on Root right away?, she knew he would ask. Because she was being selfish, she knew, because she was still mad that Root had drugged her and dragged her to the subway against her will. Was that really a good reason, though? She knew that it wasn't. What it came down to was the tightening in her chest she got whenever she was around Root, or thought about her, or someone brought her up in casual conversation. She knew that lately she had been avoiding the hacker, knew that she had purposefully not checked on her right away because the jokes that Root had been making all morning were actually getting to her. If she had checked on Root right away like she had wanted to, instead of distracting herself by calling John, would things have played out this way? Maybe. But maybe not. And she couldn't shake the fear that this was all her fault.

"What is there to talk about? Samaritan _took_ Root. I need- _We_ need to get her back."

His face remained neutral except for the slightly raised eyebrow, just enough of a change in his expression to let Shaw know he had noticed what she had said. She hated that it felt as if he knew everything she had been thinking without her having to voice it, hated the understanding in his eyes. He moved out of the doorway to lean against the subway car instead, and Bear had dutifully come to sit down next to him. Shaw neglected to expand or explain, however, and groaned before deciding her pent up energy should be put to some actual use (because it was starting to look like she might _actually _wear that hole in the already worn down floor). She plopped down unceremoniously and pulled out her nano, carefully disassembling it and beginning to clean it. She tried to ignore John's gaze, but could only put so much focus on the weapon.

"_What?_", she spit in his direction after putting the gun back together and returning it to her borrowed holster. It hadn't taken her long to clean it, but John's eyes still hadn't left her; it was as if he was looking for something, a continuation of her slip up earlier, for her to voice everything brewing inside her chest, and she just couldn't give that to him. She wasn't even sure herself what she was feeling or thinking, so how was she supposed to share those feelings or thoughts with someone else? And even if she could, her guilt wouldn't let her.

John opened his mouth, and Shaw was more than ready for whatever he was about to say, but he was saved by Harold calling for them from his place in front of the computer. Without breaking eye contact with Reese, she got up and headed towards their impromptu leader with a defeated John (and Bear) close behind her.

"All that was on the laptop", Finch began slowly, as if he was confused by what he found, "was a number. The same number. Over and over again. But Ms. Groves didn't put it there. The laptop itself was completely wiped, no data left over whatsoever, but when I integrated it in to my network to check, this number appeared."

He pointed to a monitor on his desk, the one the laptop was hooked up to, where the number mentioned was being generated over and over again, filling the entire screen and showing no signs of stopping.

"_Appeared_?", Reese repeated, his eyebrows knit together as he watched the number continue.

Shaw knew without thinking who - or _what _\- had put that number there. And she had a pretty good idea of what that number could be.

"The Machine", she said after a beat. The look on Harold's face indicated that he had come to the same conclusion. "The number. It must be a social. Right?"

Harold nodded.

"I was about to run it now. But I figured you would both like to be here to find out who's number the Machine would possibly be giving us _now_, of all times."

He said it as if he expected it to be a new number for them to try to save, whether it be from someone else or from themselves, but Shaw knew better; Root was the analog interface, the Machine's human link to the world, and she knew that whatever number it was spitting out at this particular moment, on this particular laptop, had to be the person that took Root. Or at least a lead as to where they could begin to look for her.

Three hours had now passed. And without medical attention their search to rescue Root may turn in to a recovery mission sooner rather than later.

With deft fingers, Finch entered the number into his interface. Shaw held her breath, unsure of what to expect but fully aware that this was their best - if not _only_ \- lead on where Root was, or what had happened. The search took only a few seconds, but it felt like hours, days, _weeks _to Shaw as she stood with one hand on the back of Harold's chair and the other clenching and unclenching in a fist at her side.

The name that belonged to the number popped up on Harold's screen at the same moment that Shaw released her breath, and everyone in the room stared at it in disbelief for several seconds before any of them dared to speak. It was John who broke the silence, his usual blank expression replaced by a scowl.

"_Martine_."

* * *

Finch worked tirelessly to find them a lead, and his efforts finally bore fruit just after midnight. Five hours had now passed since Shaw received Root's last transmission.

("_Shaw_", she had said pointedly for the sixth time, trying to be heard over the gunfire coming from Shaw's end of the line. The ex-agent had heard her the first time, of course, but was preoccupied with the Czeck mob members across the warehouse from her doing their best to keep her at bay. "Shaw, I don't know if you can hear me, but I've got to go dark for a while. Maybe 30 minutes, if that. I think my location's been compromised somehow."

That made Shaw pay attention. Root sounded worried, and she could actually hear the way the hacker was chewing on her bottom lip nervously. Root closed the link before Shaw could reply, however, beginning the radio silence that prompted her to call John after she had taken the metaphorical garbage out.)

Both John and Shaw were in the common space outside the subway car when Harold emerged. Reese was playing fetch with Bear, sending him after a piece of PVC pipe that he kept sending spinning end over end to a far corner of the room. Sameen had resumed her pacing.

"I can't find Martine", Finch said, and both sets of eyes snapped to him instantly. Though, if each of them were honest, they had been expecting as much. "I assume she knows we would be looking for her, and has gone to ground to avoid detection."

"Smartest things she's done yet", Shaw muttered under her breath.

"But I did find something. A group of what appears to be Samaritan agents robbed a walk-in clinic shortly after Ms. Groves was taken, but quite a ways north of where the two of you were operating."

"It's not a coincidence", John said, voice gravely from the misuse of the past few hours. "Chances are whoever took Root rendezvoused with those agents up north, and took her to a different location. There's no way they kept her in the city. They know we'll be looking everywhere for her."

"I have the address, and several known safe houses that Decima has been known to use in the immediate vicinity. I'll stay here to assist you in any way I can. I've decided to keep Detective Fusco out of this - he'll be busy covering for Mr. Reese, no doubt - but if you two encounter any problems, Ms. Morgan is in the northern part of the city today and would be more than happy to help if needed."

Shaw smirked and looked at John, who had suddenly become _very_ interested in the piece of PVC in his hand. Harold turned to head back to his computer, but she cleared her throat to get his attention.

"What did they take?" Harold looked at her blankly, so she clarified. "From the clinic. What did those Decima agents take?"

He walked to his desk, and Shaw followed, and was rewarded with an itemized print out of everything they had taken.

Most of the items on the list actually brought Shaw some semblance of relief - gauze, bandages, forceps of various sizes, antibiotics, saline and several suture kits. It would appear is if they had some intentions of providing medical care to Root, which eased some of the mysterious tension in Shaw's chest. Even without the blood she probably desperately needed, and the pain killers they would have been smart to grab, if they acted quickly they could at least give Root a chance of surviving the immediate onslaught of her injuries.

What good is she if they can't bargain her?, she reasoned with herself, then felt sick that the thought had crossed her mind at all. Root was more than a bargaining piece. She couldn't forget that, especially now. Someone had to remember that, and in times like the ones they had come in to, someone had to remember how much a single life was worth.

Certainly more than just a bargaining piece.

The tension returned ten-fold as she continued reading, however - there were 3 vials of an unnamed amphetamine, and 3 of a barbiturate, along with a box of syringes, missing from the store.

"Did you read this?", Shaw asked, her voice shaky, and the sympathetic look on Harold's face told her that he did. "They are going to _torture _her. Just like _Control _did."

John reacted at the word 'torture', knowing all too well what that particular method could result in the hacker's already weakened heart. Shaw was too busy reading the words over and over, too much anger and something else making her legs feel filled with concrete. He slipped his suit jacket back on and picked up his guns before grabbing Shaw's own leather jacket and weapons off of the cot and shoving them roughly in to her hands, still clutching the list from the clinic. He was already half-way up the stairs leading to the street when she pocketed the paper, slipped her own jacket and holster on, and followed behind him.

* * *

They drove in relative silence to the small clinic, Shaw not trusting herself to speak and John too afraid of what she would say if confronted with how she'd been acting. He turned the radio on at some point, the volume low, and the droning on of the NPR host was the only sound that accompanied them.

The police tape was still set up around the outside of the clinic when they arrived, going on six hours since Root had been taken, with just one beat cop guarding the outside. John got them inside with ease (and Shaw was glad that at least _one _their cover identities was useful - not that it matters now, but in no situation was her being a make-up counter girl ever going to help them with a number), but there wasn't much to find - the store itself hadn't sustained any damage, just a few shelves and cabinets in disarray where the agents were probably searching for the things they intended to steal. They performed a quick sweep of the area but there weren't any clues left behind, so they decided to head back to the car and begin sweeping the safe houses.

There were three in the area that Harold had identified; he had said that he was tracking Decima's known safe houses for some time, in the event they needed to 'get in contact' with them somehow. Shaw and Reese were both a little jilted that Finch had been keeping this little side project from them, but at a time like this they could do nothing short of thank him for the information. One of the safe houses was almost 20 miles north of the clinic, and since there were no reports of the burglars having a vehicle they ruled it out. However, the other two - one two miles east and one two miles south - each seemed equally as promising. John reluctantly agreed to split up, only persuaded when Shaw went off on a tangent of completely nonsensical-seeming medical jargon speculating the extent and severity of Root's possibly still untreated injuries. As he headed south, he handed her a few extra magazines and - to Shaw's chagrin - two grenades.

"Be careful, Shaw", he said. "But not too careful."

The house Shaw had chosen was just shy of two miles east of the clinic, in a nice suburban neighborhood where all the houses had white picket fences and colorful flowers in their small front yards. Shaw grimaced, uncomfortable with the happy faces that greeted her as the sun rose, and walked a little faster to the house itself. It was a robin blue two story with white shutters and blooming flowers in the pots on the small front porch - a picture fucking perfect place for Decima agents to hide, she thought.

Deciding that kicking in the front door with the eyes of watchful neighbors on her was not the best way to get in, she slowly walked around the side of the house and found the back door. It was locked, but picked easily, and she drew her nano as she slipped in. Though the outside of the house was cheery and well-kept, the inside was a completely different story - there was minimal furniture (if milk crates and broken mismatched chairs could really be called furniture) and take out boxes littering almost every surface and much of the floor. There was also a loaded M9 next to the sink in the kitchen, which she slid in to her waistband as she crept through. Her own gun drawn and leveled, she cleared the quiet first story without finding much other than more take out boxes and a John Wayne movie playing on the small television in the living room. As she begin to ascend the stairs, she noticed the shower running - the agent watching the house was taking a shower, with no one else there to keep point. Amateur hour, she thought, remembering all of the times her and Cole or John or even Root herself had to alternate in a location in order to always have someone standing sentry.

Shaw cleared every room but the bathroom, all of which were furnished much like the rooms downstairs. Finally, she made her way to the bathroom and opened the door. She whistled, loudly to get the attention of whoever it was in the shower. The agent, a chubby middle-aged man with the longer hairs from his comb over stuck to the side of his face , obviously shocked, pulled back the curtain and made to reach for the weapon sitting on the back of the toilet. Shaw was ready to take the shot - kneecaps, of course - but didn't have to. The man slipped, one foot on either side of the wall of the tub, and met the cold porcelain with his very exposed genitals. She laughed and let her weapon fall to her side as she walked over to remove the magazine of the gun on the toilet.

It didn't take long to drag the agent to the adjoining bedroom and zip-tie him to a chair (she also took the liberty of throwing a towel over him, not waiting to be distracted by his doughy body as she tried to extract information from him). She checked his mouth (which he fought at first, earning him several introductions with the butt of her gun until he let her check) for cyanide capsules, not wanting to risk losing the only lead they've got to something other than her own bullets.

"Where is she?", she said as soon as his eyes regained some focused. He looked up at her, confused, so she pressed the cool muzzle of her gun against his right knee. "Tall, brown hair, talks to herself a lot. I've been worried sick about her. Now. Where is she?"

The man set his jaw, as Shaw almost wished that he would, and she didn't hesitate to pull the trigger. He cried out in agony as the blood began to run down his bare leg, but still refused to answer. Shaw tilted her head to the side with a little smile and slowly moved the muzzle to the same place on his opposite knee.

"Now that you know I won't hesitate to shoot you, would you _please _tell me where my friend is?" Her words were honey sweet, but the fire in her eyes betrayed her. She pressed the muzzle down just a little harder in to his pale skin, causing him to gasp.

"I don't- I don't know!", he finally spit out, realizing that it was useless to resist if he had any desire to make it out of the safe house alive. "They came here late last night to get the supplies we stole and took off. She was in the car with them, I know that, and they had a doctor with them. At gunpoint! He was crying, and called out to us to help him! But that's all I know! I swear!"

"And she was alive?"

She pressed down even harder, urging him to answer in a timely manner.

"_Yes_! Yes, God, she was alive!"

He began to sob, mumbling about his wife and kid or some other nonsense that Shaw could not have cared less about at the moment. Keeping the muzzle pressed firmly to his knee, she used her free hand to open up a comm link with John. She was met with gunfire, and smirked to herself as she waited for a pause.

"Having fun?", she asked with amusement she did not feel.

"Not exactly." More gunfire, the distinct sounds of bodies dropping. Silence. "They didn't know anything here."

"I win, then. Root is alive. Or at least was when they brought her here and picked up the supplies they stole from the store."

"And Martine?"

"I'm working on it. I'll get back to you."

John barely had time to get in a 'don't kill him' before Shaw closed the link.

She turned her attention back to the Decima agent, still sobbing in the chair.

"Was Martine with them?", Shaw began. The man's eyes opened wide, and he shook his head violently.

"I- I can't! You don't understand. They'll kill me! They'll kill my wife, they'll kill my daughter, they'll kill-"

"Whatever you _think _they'll do to you", she interrupted, pressing the muzzle down harder still so that she knew it was hurting him, "is not nearly as bad as the fucking _hell _I will _personally_ rain down on you and every single person you have ever met if you don't answer my fucking question."

He just sobbed and shook his head again, so Shaw pulled the trigger without flinching. He cried out, worse than the first time, just as Harold open up a link to her.

"Ms. Shaw!", his worried voice came through her earpiece a little tinny. "_Please_ remember that we don't _kill_ people! I believe this interrogation has gone on long enough!"

Shaw didn't respond. What was there for her to say? She slowly moved the towel from the agent's waist, dropping it in a heap on the floor next to the chair, and steadily aimed her gun at his package.

"I'm not going to ask you again", she said quietly, still ignoring Finch and his protests. "Was. Martine. Here?"

A long moment passed - all three of them held their breath as they waited on the action of the others. She tightened her finger ever so slightly on the trigger, ready to pull it once her internal countdown reached zero, but the agent finally acquiesced round abouts the number '3'.

"My phone!", he stuttered out. Finch muttered 'thank god' before closing the link without another word to Shaw herself. "She was here. And she put her number in my phone in case something happened. She- she said it was her personal cellphone!"

Suddenly everything moved in double time and Shaw was racing towards the bureau where the man indicated his cell to be. Without hesitating she selected Martine's name in his contacts, and pressed the phone up to her ear with her free hand - the one holding her nano was still aimed at the man, this time at his head.

There was so much background noises that Shaw could barely make out Martine's words at first - she had to finally drop her aim on the agent for the first time since she found him in the shower, and cup the hand still holding her weapon over her other ear and strain to hear her.

"I believe I have something you want", Martine said immediately, and Shaw could hear the smirk. She knew Shaw would call. She knew all of this would happen. And it did nothing but fill Shaw's chest with fire.

"Yeah. I believe you do."

She said nothing for a long time, the indiscernible noises behind her the only thing coming through the line. Shaw cleared her throat, annoyed, yet Martine still said nothing.

"I want to know she's still alive, Martine." There was a chuckle at that, as smug as the Decima agent herself. "I want to talk to Root."

Martine _tsked_, and Shaw could make out some movement over the still overtly-loud line. She had been put on speaker, she noticed, and now the background noise was coming through much clearer than it had been before.

It was Root screaming.


	3. Chapter 3

By the time Reese had made it to the neighborhood Shaw was in, he didn't need the exact coordinates that Harold given him to find her. From several blocks away he could see black smoke rising and people, who had probably just woken up to gather their newspapers and drink their morning coffee with the slowly rising sun, meandering towards the source. He phoned Zoe, who quickly agreed to meet him there as soon as possible to provide a safe getaway for the two of them. Reese then opened a link with Finch, who was still jilted over Shaw's blatant dismissal of him earlier.

"Finch, we _may _need some damage control."

"Oh god", he sighed, "_please _tell me Ms. Shaw didn't kill that man."

"I'm not sure yet. But if he's still in the house he won't be alive much longer."

"What on earth is that supposed to mean, Mr. Reese?"

"Well", John did his best to hide his amusement (because he knew he should definitely _not _be amused by this), "it appears as if Shaw _may _have burnt the house down. With no signs of the agent making it out. And if it were _me_, and _I _really wanted to send a message to Samaritan..."

He trailed off, knowing Finch will pick up on his train of thought. Shaw received more or less the same training that Reese had, so he understood her and how she operated more than she cared to admit, or acknowledge. He also knew how the whole world seems to crumble when someone you care about it taken from you - whether on not you want to admit that you actually care about that person, to them or others or even yourself. (Eventually, he thought, Shaw was going to have to admit that she actually cared about the members of their little team of delinquents - even Root.) The other side of the line was silent however, and John wondered if he had somehow lost his connection.

"Finch?"

"I'm sorry, Mr. Reese", Harold began slowly after another moment had passed, "I _can't _have heard you correctly. It sounded like you said Ms. Shaw burnt down a residence in a heavily populated suburban area, and quite possibly left the body of a debilitated Decima agent inside."

As if on cue, Shaw herself strolled up alongside Reese with one hand in her pocket and the other holding a cup of coffee. She looked completely unaffected by the home on fire before her, or the scared citizens gathering around at a safe distance - in fact, if it wasn't for the hardly noticeable traces of dried blood on her jacket and the grey shirt she was wearing underneath, John would actually begin to doubt she was involved in this at all.

"That's exactly what he said, Harold." She cut off his lecture before he even began, still looking blankly at the chaos she had caused. "And don't worry, that agent is alive. In the trunk of a car somewhere near the river. Someone will find him before he bleeds out."

John looked at her skeptically, but she simply shrugged.

"Well. Probably, anyways."

Finch sighed wearily.

"I take it you extracted some information from the poor man first?"

"They have Root, Harold. They have her, and they're _torturing _her. And-"

Shaw paused, closed her eyes and took a deep breath despite the constriction in her chest. The fire Martine had put there had seemingly combusted her entire being, and she felt like the house just a few hundred feet in front of her - smoldering, and burning from the inside out.

"And they want to trade her for the Machine."

* * *

Zoe picked them up shortly after the fire department arrived, pulling her car to a stop a block away and phoning John to let him know she was there. She had tried to ask the two stoic ex-agents about what they case they were working on but was met with silence, so they drove back to the clinic where they had left their borrowed car much as Reese and Shaw had driven there in the first place. When they arrived, however, Finch's car was gone - Decima, he muttered over the line when they let him know, annoyed - so they followed the shadow map to an old parking garage and stole a car there to keep Samaritan off their trail as they drove back to the city.

"I guess it's pointless to ask what happened?", Zoe dared to ask as she pulled next to a curb in Chinatown to drop them off.

Shaw grunted in response, throwing the door open and storming off without closing it. John slowly got out and closed it gently for her, then ducked his head to offer Zoe an apologetic smile.

"Someone took our friend. She's not taking it well." She returned his smile with a sad one of her own, and leaned across the center counsel to press a gentle kiss to his cheek before putting the car in drive again and waiting for him to close his own door.

"Well I hope you find your friend soon. And that Shaw doesn't burn down any more houses in the meantime."

"No promises", he smirked at her. "Thanks, Zoe. I'll call you."

He caught up with Shaw quickly and grabbed her arm above the elbow roughly to stop her. Her instincts took over, as he knew they would, and she spun around quickly drawing her gun. Reese anticipated the action however, expected it even, and used her own momentum to shove her against the wall with the hand holding her weapon twisted behind her back and the elbow of his free arm pressed harshly between her shoulder blades. She grunted, letting her forehead fall against the wall in front of her; she had walked right in to this. Amateur hour, she thought for the second time today. (Was that really just a few hours ago?)

"Is there a problem, John?"

"I don't know, Shaw", he said through clenched teeth. He let her go - but not without stripping her of the nano in her hand and the M9 she still had in her waistband - and she turned around to face him. "Is there?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"How about the fact that you systematically tortured a Decima agent for information? Or we could talk about how you just burnt down a house in the suburbs to send a message - what message, I'm not sure. That you're pissed? I'm sure they've gathered as much."

Shaw's shoulders fell in something akin to defeat, but she kept her chin high and her gaze locked on John's. There was something John couldn't place in her eyes, but something he recognized - it was the same look that stared back at him in the mirror after Jessica. After Joss. It surprised him, and suddenly everything she had done had made sense. It was more than the world falling around her because someone took Root from right under their noses. It was that Shaw cared for her, and that she was blaming herself for all of this happening in the first place. It was the ground beneath her feet crumbling with every step because she could do nothing to help her, or to save her.

"It's not your fault", Reese said quietly, with as much compassion as he could muster, when Shaw still didn't answer. She finally looked away. "All of this, it's not your fault. _Martine _did this. Even if you had gone the second you were done at the warehouse, chances are you would have still been too late."

"You can't let this effect how we operate", he added, "because it could be the difference between life and death for Root right now. We need you at your best. _She _needs you at your best, Shaw."

Her stillness surprised him, which is why he wasn't at all prepared when she reared back and punched him square in the jaw. He brought a hand up to rub at the spot, and Shaw moved quickly to put him in a position against the wall similar to the one she had just been in. Reese had size on her, and could have probably gotten out of the hold if he tried, but he let Shaw get the tension out.

He remembered all too well how it felt.

"If you say that shit to me again, if you so much as _mention _it again", she said - voice wavering and eyes stinging - as she was retrieving her weapons from him, "I _will _shoot you."

Bear greeting them happily as they descended into the subway, but Shaw ignored him and went straight to where Finch was still working tirelessly on finding them a lead. He instead went up to Reese, still rubbing absently at his already bruising jaw, and sat dutifully at his feet as he awaited some sort of affection from at least one of them. Feeling bad, he kneeled in front of Bear and used both hands to scratch behind his ears and under his chin.

"Don't worry, buddy", Reese murmured to him and he tilted his head, "she's just having a bad day."

Shaw walked in to Harold typing away on his computer, doing his best to find them a something on where Decima might be keeping Root. His efforts had been in vain thus far, it would seem, but he was working on a lead that he hoped would lead them to something at least moderately useful.

"I put in an anonymous tip about the car by the river", he said to her in greeting without looking up, "and it seems the man found had no memory of how he ended up there, naked, in the truck of his own car, or how he received a gunshot wound in each knee. I wonder how you managed to pull _that _off, Ms. Shaw?"

Shaw threw down the man's driver's license and a photo of him and his family in lieu of answering, knowing that Finch would be able to put two and two together - now Shaw knew where the man lived, and what his family look like. Just like that, the woman became more terrifying to the Decima agent than Martine, or all of Samaritan's other agents combined. Finch gulped.

"Need I remind you, Ms. Shaw, that we operate differently than you did when you were working for the ISA. You can _not _torture a man for information this way, whether it be physically _or _emotionally. We are better than that. _You _are better than that."

"Need I remind _you_, Harold, that Root has now been missing for", she glanced down at her watch and grimaced, "_twelve _hours. And has been being tortured by Martine and her lackeys for who knows how long to get information on _your _Machine. I think two kneecaps and a Decima safe house in the suburbs are a _small _price to pay to get her back."

They regarded each other seriously. Finch broke the eye contract first and set his jaw, turning back to his computer and picking up his typing where he had left off without another word to Shaw. She left the subway car and went to where she had been keeping her clothes to change out of her bloodied jacket and shirt. She was halfway through pulling on a clean pair of jeans when she was hit suddenly with an overwhelming desire to hurt someone. And she thought of how she had punched John, and how it didn't actually make her feel better like she had thought that it would, so she decided that if she was going to punish anyone it was going to be herself. Changing quickly into running shorts and tying up her Nike's tightly, she ran out of the subway without a word to either of the boys - they knew that she knew the shadow map well enough to stay out of Samaritan's ever-watchful eye.

And if John was completely honest, she had hit him harder than he was letting on and he had no intentions of a repeat performance.

After watching her ascend the stairs quickly and disappear out of sight, Reese headed into the subway car with Bear still in tow.

"Mr. Reese", Harold said as he finally ceased his angry typing and turned away from the keyboard completely. "Could _you _perhaps fill me in on Ms. Shaw's conversation with Martine? Since she seems less inclined to do so at the moment."

John sat down heavily on one of the seats built into the side of the subway car, the exhaustion of the past twelve hours starting to weigh on him. He was exhausted, and hungry, and in desperate need of a shower, but couldn't find it within himself to take the time to rid himself of those comparatively small discomforts while Root was somewhere still unknown to them being tortured for information that no one could give.

"I'm not sure what else there is to say, Harold. Martine had Root somewhere, torturing her for information on the Machine, and the only way she'll stop - and she did say _stop_, Harold, not 'let her go' or 'return her to us', just 'stop' - is if we give her the location of the Machine."

"Which none of us knows", Finch finished for him with a frown.

John nodded, sinking a little further into the seat. How were they supposed to save Root if the only information Martine wanted was something that not a single of them was privy to? Not even Root - the analog interface, a person that reveres the Machine as her God and Messiah - knew where the Machine was. And if by some miracle they could get the location, and get it to Martine, the Decima agent had in no way guaranteed Root's safety. She had said she would stop torturing her, sure, but what of the medical attention she had needed even before hours of enduring whatever it was that Martine was doing to her? She had said nothing of returning Root to them, no matter her condition. He felt defeated, as if there was very little if any chance of Root making it out of the situation alive.

He in no way condoned it, but fully understood why Shaw burnt the safe house down. Because what else was there for her to do but destroy everything around her at this point?

Shaw returned two hours later, sweaty from her ten mile run and with a busted lip from the fight she started in a bar in the inner city. Reese walked up cautiously with a towel and handed it to her; she accepted it without looking at him, and went straight to the make-shift shower Reese and Fusco had built when she had first been brought down. She showered quickly and threw on some clean clothes - black jeans and a shirt to match, and the leather jacket with the Decima agent's blood still on it - and was surprised to see John standing just outside the door to the bathroom waiting for her.

"Hungry?", he asked innocently. She smirked at him and nodded, knowing that this was the closest thing to an apology she was going to get from her partner. "I hear there's a decent steak place up the street."

With that the two of them head out, Bear following behind on the leash with his tongue out happily, and towards the aforementioned steak place north of them. They walk in a complacent silence, not entirely uncomfortable but with the air still tinged with words unsaid, for a few blocks when a payphone started to ring. They glanced sideways at each other and decided without words to keep walking, but then the next one started to ring as well, and soon every payphone on the street was ringing. John acquiesced, sighing as he picked up the receiver closest to him.

Shaw bounced from one foot to the other impatiently as he did so, holding Bear's leash in one hand and stuffing the other in her pocket. Reese motioned to her for a piece of paper and a pen, which she didn't have, so she through her hands up helplessly at him with a quirked eyebrow. She watched him for a moment and saw his eyes widen - he pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at Shaw with an expression she didn't recognize - something akin to sympathy, she realized as he extended the receiver to her for her to take. Reaching out with a hand that she just realized was shaking, she took it and placed it tightly against her ear to hear over the noise of the city.

(She thought of how she had done this not too long ago, with the agent's phone pressed just as tightly to her ear as she struggled to hear Martine over all the noise in the background.

Over Root's screaming, she corrected herself.)

"HOTEL. ECHO. LIMA. PAPA. HOTEL. ECHO. ROMEO. HOTEL. ECHO. LIMA. PAPA. HOTEL. ECHO. ROMEO. HOTEL. ECHO. LIMA. PAPA. HOTEL. ECHO. ROMEO..."

Over and over, the generated voice of the Machine said the words in her ear. She mirrored John's reaction, slowly lowering the receiver to her side with shaking hands and her eyes wide.

_Help her_, it was saying.


	4. Chapter 4

Shaw hung the phone up with her hands still shaking - shaking badly enough that Reese noticed it, and carefully removed Bear's leash from the fingers it was wound around in fear that she might actually drop it. She looked nervously from side to side, opening her month as if she wanted to say something but she ended up just closing it again with her bottom lip pulled tightly between her teeth.

Reese opened up a comm link with Finch with his eyes still on his partner, who seemed more shocked about the fact that the Machine had contacted them despite the risk of Samaritan finding out than about what it had actually said. John agreed to task Fusco with getting something to eat for all of them (and Bear) and return to the subway right away, both of them agreeing that they needed to find a way to somehow find Root, and now.

As if the need wasn't pressing enough already.

"Shaw", he said after hastily ending his conversation with a very disgruntled Lionel, who reluctantly agreed to grab some food on his way over after dropping off his son. "Are you okay?"

Without a response, or any type of preface or warning at all, she took off in a jog, fighting against the flow of traffic on the sidewalk to the east and out of Chinatown.

And, Reese noticed when she was too far ahead of him for him to stop her, out of the black out area they were in on the shadow map.

(Once Shaw had ridden a bicycle who knows how many miles to save Root when she wasn't even sure that Root _needed _saving - she just knew that Root had gone in alone, and that it made her gut feel filled with ice water. So she peddled without stopping, doing whatever she could to keep her mind on the burning in her legs and not her frozen insides.

Now Shaw would ride that bike across the entire country if she thought it would help, would swim any ocean or climb any mountain if she thought for a second that it would save Root from a fate she still felt was entirely her fault.

Only she didn't have anywhere to go. The only thing she had was the fire in her chest that had been burning since she walked in to that apartment building so long ago now, so unlike the freezing she had felt that day. The ice in her gut slowed her down even as it sped her up; the fire she felt now did nothing but make her want shove grenades in the mouth of every person that dared to keep her from getting to Root.)

When he finally caught up to her, out of breath and with Bear still in tow, Shaw was stopped in the middle of the sidewalk more than a mile away from where they had gotten the phone call with angry New Yorkers shouldering rudely by her and muttering to themselves. Her eyes were scanning the buildings for something, and at first Reese wasn't sure what - but then she found her mark and started to walk towards it, fuelled by new purpose, and he understood.

She was looking for a _camera_.

Again Shaw stopped in the middle of a busy sidewalk, disregarding the people who gave her dirty looks, just below the security camera belonging to the bank on the corner.

(Reese knew he should drag her back to the dark zone, because anything Shaw was saying to the Machine was sure to be heard by Samaritan as well, and therefore by Martine. But he had to believe that the Machine had a plan - if it risked the call to the pay phones to get their attention, it had to know that Shaw would demand more.

Either way, he knew Shaw wouldn't leave without saying what she had come to the Machine to say without a fight, and one solid shot to the face was all he had in him to take today.)

"How the fuck am I supposed to help her if I don't even know where the fuck she is, you stupid fucking robot!"

On any other day Shaw would have felt absolutely ridiculous for yelling at a camera in the middle of a crowd of people. But she was beyond caring about that, or them, or anything at this point.

(She could hear Root in the back of her mind _\- She's not a robot, Shaw _\- and it made her want to vomit.)

The fire that had been set was spreading, and Martine and the Machine's call were nothing short of gasoline. Shaw was ready to burn everything down.

"I can't save her if I don't know where to save her _from_!", she continued. She noticed for the first time today how tired she was, weary down to her bones, and all she wanted in the entire world was to fall asleep in her own apartment knowing that Root was safe and might even be breaking in later. "You've got me to give me _something_!"

"_Please_", she added in a frustrated whisper. John wasn't certain that the Machine would even be able to hear it - but there was always the chance that she was offering that particular plea not to Root's God, but to her own.

The camera did little more than flicker it's red light at her, however, as if either of them expected anything else, and she resisted the urge to just sit down on the sidewalk in defeat. John came up behind her and placed a hand on her shoulder, gentle yet grounding, and steered a surprisingly compliant Shaw back to the dark zone and towards the subway.

* * *

What Root was instantly aware of when she again regained consciousness was pain - an abhorrent amount, an offensive assault on all of her senses coming from seemingly every direction so wholly that she truly had no idea where it began or where it ended. She cried out in agony, for the tenth of hundredth or _thousandth _time - she had long ago lost count - which did nothing to ease her discomfort. The poorly-done stitches over the three gunshot wounds in her upper abdomen stretched and pulled uncomfortably, and she knew without a doubt that at least one of them had already torn and that she was bleeding again. Not through her shirt, of course, which had been removed long ago along with her jeans and jacket, leaving her zip-tied tightly to a chair and blindfolded in her underwear and bra and bleeding all over both.

Root trashed violently against her bonds in frustration - but all she earned for her efforts was the zip-ties digging even further into her wrists and ankles, and another message from the Machine through her implant.

_Stop_, She said. _Please_.

And Root laughed at that, at the simplicity of it. She laughed because the Machine had said _please_, and at a time like this - after being bound to a chair and tortured for hours on end - a courtesy as common as the word please seemed so hysterical. Soon, however, her laughter dissolved to sobbing as the Machine sent to her another message.

_They will come_.

Her sobbing continued as the Machine returned to updating her on her vital signs, as it had been doing for as long as she could recall at the moment - her heart rate and temperature, parts of the body effected by a blow to the temporal lobe, the adverse cardiological effects of a regular regimen of alternating amphetamines and barbiturates (as if it was her choice), the statistics of surviving a single gunshot to center mass, the statistics of surviving three.

Root lost herself in the familiar droning on of the Machine and let her crying taper off. The blindfold prevented her from seeing her surroundings, and other than the statistics buzzing in her implant, there was no sound around her.

She must have lost consciousness again - _Substantial blood loss_, the Machine chirped, _Chance of survival 45.9%, seek medical attention immediately_ \- and when she came to she heard the clicking of heels approaching her from somewhere far off. They echoed all around her until they were close enough to almost feel through her feet firmly planted on the floor, and she knew what was going to happen next before it did; she heard a bag unzip, the top of a syringe pop off, and seconds later she felt the needle as it was inserted none too gently into her arm below the elbow just as the many before it had been.

_Amobarbital_, the Machine chirped in her ear, _200 milligrams. Fifteenth dose in five hours_.

Root clenched her fists and fought against the almost instant wave of exhaustion the injection brought on, doing her best to keep her eyes open even against the blindfold that kept her in darkness regardless. Just as she was beginning to drift off, her chest aching uncomfortably and head sluggish, she felt a needle in her other arm.

_Unknown intravenous amphetamine. 40 milligrams. Fifteenth dose in five hours_.

_Warning_, the Machine chirped again, _heart rate reaching dangerous levels. Analog interface in immediate danger. Change of survival 41.6%. Seek medical attention immediately_.

Gasping for air, with her heart now feeling as if it was going to burst through her ribs and land on her lap, Root again screamed in agony.

"Have you had enough yet?", Martine's lackey asked in a tone that begged her to say no.

"_Enough_? I'm having a _blast_", she replied to him through clenched teeth as she tried to focus her eyes. She was doing everything she could to breathe through the pain but couldn't stop sob that overtook her.

_They will come_, the Machine said again, and Root wished she could believe Her.

"This could all end soon", Martine's cool voice cut through her cries as if they didn't exist - Root imagined that they didn't, not to her. She could hear her set down the syringe that had been in her hand and the running of water somewhere far off. Root would absolutely kill her for a drink of that water, as if she needed any other reasons to do so. "All I need is the location of the Machine. Give me that and I'll pack up all my _toys _and leave you here for your friends to pick up. I'm almost positive you'll live that long, too."

_Without medical attention, analog interface has 41.4% chance of survival. Without a transfusion, analog interface will expire in approximately six hours._

"Lucky me", Root muttered in what Martine assumed was a response to her and not to the Machine.

She felt agile fingers undoing the knot at the back of her head, and carefully the blindfold was lifted from her eyes. The bright lights blinded her, and she blinked defiantly against both them and the tears in her eyes for a moment before she focused on Martine just before her - she smirked, filled with nothing but malice, before raising a perfectly manicured finger and placing it gently at the dip between Root's collarbones.

"I had a nice chat with your friend, Agent Shaw", Martine said with a small faux pout as she dug her nail into the soft flesh - Root's pain was all over and constant at this point, however, so she held Martine's gaze without flinching.

(Just the mention of Shaw's name gave Root move bravery than anything the Machine had whispered in her ear up until this point - a fact that felt both blasphemous and absolute at the same time. She had insisted that they were coming for her, that she should trust Her and Her agents, and that they wouldn't leave her behind. But it was something different to hear that Shaw herself, a skilled ex ISA agent Root would be embarrassed to admit out loud she was enamored by before she even met her, was actually looking for her.

Root thought of Shaw, of her casual apathy and excellent aim. But mostly she thought of her smile, and the way her eyebrows knit together in something that looked like confusion whenever Root leaned in just a little too close.

The Machine will keep her mind occupied, she knew, but Shaw's smile would keep Root going. She swore to herself that if she got out of this, she would always lean in even closer. She might even lean in closer enough to-)

"She's not very nice", Martine interrupted Root's thoughts. Slowly, she dragged the nail harshly down Root's sternum, across the top of her bra along her breast, and finally came to a stop above her erratically beating heart with a thin pink trail left in it's wake. Root noticed the way she tilted her head to the side, and her pout was once again replaced with that vicious smirk - she was admiring her work, Root realized sickeningly, admiring the scratches and burns and bullet holes that would soon scar her from basically head to toe, scars she herself had inflicted on Root's pale skin in the hours since she had her shot down in the apartment building. It made Root's stomach churn. "She took one of my better agents, and burnt down my favorite safe house."

"I wish I could say I was sorry, but I'm actually quite a fan of Shaw's more naughty side."

In lieu of a response Martine's large lackey, a man that would tower over Root even if she was standing and with hands as big as Root's face, stepped forward and smacked her square in her cheek. Her head snapped to the side from the impact and she saw spots in her eyes. She wanted to cry out but bit down on her freshly split lip to stop herself - she didn't want to give him, or Martine, or anyone else the pleasure of hearing any more of her sobbing.

With her arms crossed, Martine just smiled down at her.

"Let me share some information with you. Many of our agents have more... colorful pasts. Decima employs hundreds, if not thousands, of murderers, mercenaries, hitmen, thieves, kidnappers... We have any and every type of criminal here, as you may know, because we are in need of a very particular skill set at times and they are in need of a place to utilize their skills without fear of retribution."

"_Retribution_?", Root said after spitting a fair amount of blood out of her mouth and, she noticed, a tooth - _Cuspid, left side, one tooth of thirty two. Average cost to replace, $4500_. The Machine churned out facts on dental implants and it almost made Root want to laugh. "You mean _jail_?"

Martine simply smirked and turned slightly to nod her head at an agent standing by the door. He left but returned a moment later with none other than Jeremy Lambert in tow. His expensive suit was pressed and crisp, every hair in place, and he looked quite out of place in the dark and dingy room that had housed Root and her torturers for who knows how many hours.

"Don't be so narrow-minded, Ms. Groves." He walked up to her slowly and leaned forward and into her personal space, presumably assessing the damage Martine had inflicted before his arrival. Root kept her face as expressionless as possible as she turned her head to the side slightly and spit more blood out of her mouth, all while keeping her eyes on Jeremy. "A criminal such as yourself must know the importance of being able to ply your trade in the name of something good."

He extended a handkerchief to her from his breast pocket, only to laugh to himself with a shake of his head when he realized that she wouldn't be able to accept it even if she wanted to (which she, of course, did not).

"I'm not sure I would describe anything Samaritan does as good, _Jerry_."

_Reevaluate strategy._

She earned another smack in the face from Martine's lackey for her comment, and spit even more blood out of her mouth - courtesy of a new split in her upper lip this time - before carefully looking her surprise guest up and down as her vision again struggled to focus.

"Jeremy Lambert", she said slowly, and he took it as if she had just now recognized him. She let him think that; in reality she was asking the Machine to help her evaluate her new adversary.

"In the flesh", he replied with a little bow, stuffing the handkerchief back into his pocket, but she wasn't listening to him at all. He walked away shortly thereafter to speak with his blonde counterpart, leaving Root to focus on whatever information she was about to receive.

_Jeremy Michael Lambert. 13 September 1978. Born in Dudley, England. Naturalized as a United States citizen on 16 July 2005. No other pertinent information._

Root frowned at the lack of information, hoping that the Machine will run his known aliases without her being able to ask. Of course, She does, and Root wondered not for the first time if the Machine could actually read her mind somehow.

_Possible alias: Michael Jeremy Grissom. 13 September 1978. Born in Dudley, England. Reported missing from his home, 12 July 2005. Anomaly: date missing corresponds closely with a social security number issued to Jeremy Michael Lambert; application sponsored by Decima Technologies. Anomaly: photographic identification of Grissom matches photographic identification of Lambert on file 96.689% when run through facial recognition software._

_Criminal record_, the Machine continued as Jeremy and Martine exchanged hushed words just out of earshot, _convicted for five counts of aggravated assault_, _two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and two counts of attempted murder in 1992. Served nine of ten years, released early on parole for good behavior in 2001. Charged with several crimes in April 2005 but disappeared before trail. Charges: seven counts of rape, seven counts of attempted murder, two counts of first degree murder._

As the Machine finished Lambert's list of charges, Root's face dropped. She suddenly understood what Martine had been talking about when she said Decima gave its more colorful agents the chances to utilize their talents for its own greater good - at the time it seemed pointless, a way to show Root that the company was even _more _corrupt and powerful than previously thought possible, but now it was coming together in her still cloudy mind.

They let their mercenaries and hitmen kidnap her. They took full advantage of Martine's psychopathic tendencies by letting her torture her to her content. But they still didn't break Root.

So they brought in a murderer and a rapist to see if he could do what they had so far been unable to do in what she could only assume was the _one _way he knew best.

No longer did the thought of Shaw's smile fill Root with a thin layer of hope, just enough to keep her holding on. Instead it made her chest feel heavy, filling her with a hopelessness and a sense of loss she had thus far been able to avoid. And no longer did the Machine's droning on calm her, but instead made her fear that the last thing she might hear would be statistics and numbers and not so much a single human voice.

All she could do was cry, catching the attention of a seemingly very pleased Martine, who stopped her conversation with Jeremy with a wave of her hand to saunter back over. Root looked up at her with defiance she did not feel, and knew instantly that Martine was fully aware that Root had at least began to piece together their intentions. She dared a look over the Decima agent's shoulder, where Jeremy was removing is suit jacket and grinning at her.

"I knew you would like my plan as much as I do. You've just been so _naughty_, and I figured Jeremy would have an idea or two of how to deal with you. I wonder", Martine said with a viscous disdain as she slowly ran her thumb across Root's damp cheek where her tears had been falling before sticking it in her mouth with a satisfied hum, "what's your breaking point taste like?"


	5. Chapter 5

A lot of people were very upset about the way the last chapter ended and I received several not-very-nice messages and comments. Which is fine, no one in forcing you to read it and I in no way want to discourage you from commenting regardless of how you feel about what I have chosen to write. I just wanted to say that I thought the visceral reaction I got from some people was a bit much. I also want to put out there, for those who may be worried about it, that there is in **no way, shape, or form **going to be a rape or non-con scene in this story. I used it as a plot device because in my opinion it added another level to the sense of urgency and angst in the story while giving a little bit of a background to Decima's more recognizable agents.

For those of you that have reviewed with both negative (but constructive) and positive comments, I appreciate you! Thanks again for reading.

* * *

Returning to the subway just sunk the weariness Shaw had felt outside even further into her bones, so she decided to try to sleep some as the boys ate. Reese was of course concerned that Shaw didn't show _any _interest in the food Fusco had brought, but she waved him off without a word as she walked to her cot.

"We'll try to save you some", the detective called out to her from the subway car through a mouth full of Philly cheese steak. She grimaced, not hungry at all, and walked a little quicker.

To her surprise, she fell asleep almost instantly even with the burning she still felt, and dreamt of Root despite her best efforts not to think of her.

(_This isn't your fault_, she told Shaw with a small smile - the one with her head cocked to the side, the one that reached her eyes. The one that Shaw knew was reserved just for her.

_It is though_, Shaw replied as she reached out to touch her. Her fingers went right through her, however, leaving behind white wisps in their wake as if she was a ghost already. _I can't lose you, Root. Is it fucked up that you're all I've got?_

_Not at all. Just listen to the Machine, Sameen. I do._

She pulled back her hair to tap lightly on her scar, the scar Control had gifted her when she took Root's ear.

_You haven't lost me. Just... misplaced me, _she continued.

_Is there a difference?_

Root just smiled at her again, that twinkle in her eye that Shaw knew signified something she wouldn't like was about to come tumbling out of the hacker's mouth. She waited for words that never came - instead Root leaned forward and placed her lips gently against Shaw's pout.

Shaw woke with a gasp, sitting straight up. She brought a finger to her lips, wondering why that kiss had felt solid and warm and _real _when Root had disappeared under the fingertips when she had tried to touch her just before that.)

She got up and stretched to try to relieve some of the soreness in her muscles. Grumbling when it did nothing of the sort, she started off towards the subway car where Finch was typing away on his computer while Reese and Fusco were pouring over a map of the city. She walked closer to them and noticed that they had marked where they had already searched with a red marker, and used a blue one to trace all the paths that they had followed up until this point. Behind them, on the glass of a subway window, was a pyramid of pictures of Decima agents with Martine and Jeremy as the second row from the top, and a picture of Root at the pinnacle - it was a picture pulled from some security footage, a little blurry and with the timestamp still on the bottom, but Shaw knew that a proper picture of Root were probably a little hard to come by with the Machine taking such care to conceal her real identity. Next to the picture was the printed out list of medical supplies that Decima had stolen earlier in the day, which Harold had written Root's suspected injuries on in scribbled black pen. Above the picture he had written 'Samantha Groves' with a dry erase marker; Shaw ran over the ink with a broad stroke of her thumb, effectively removing it, and picked up the marker to write 'Root' there instead. Everyone in the subway stopped what they were doing when they saw her writing, but it seemed as if her team members were hesitant to say anything to her about it.

"Do we have anything?", she asked to break up the silence.

"Nothing solid", Reese replied, standing up straight and stretching his arms above his head. He looked as tired as Shaw felt, still wearing the suit from the day before and sporting a nasty purple bruise on his jaw from when Shaw had punched him.

"We found the doctor that Decima kidnapped", Lionel said with a frown. He passed her a file folder with pictures a of him and of where they had found his body, killed execution style just north of the city limits and left on the side of a back road. "All they found on him was a pair of bloody gloves, stuffed in his coat pocket. They'll run the DNA at the prescient but if it's CocoaPuff's I would bet it isn't going to show up in any of our systems."

Finch pushed himself away from his computer slightly and offered her a sympathetic look before continuing where Fusco had left off.

"The hospital they had kidnapped the doctor from, a trauma surgeon by the name of Charles Camp, also had reports of a stolen car earlier that evening. It seems a group of masked individuals hijacked it from a paramedic just ending her shift right around the time that you had gotten to the apartment building where Ms. Groves had been taken from. I pulled the security footage, but there isn't anything to go off of there; just the three masked indivivuals, who meet a blonde woman just within the camera's view. It would be safe to assume that the woman is Martine, and therefore that this is how they transported Root without anyone noticing."

He played the footage again, surely for Shaw's benefit - just as he had said, three masked men held the terrified paramedic at gun point before pulling her out of her beat up Suburban and climbing inside of it themselves. They stopped in the parking lot, right on the edge of the camera's scope, to pick up a blonde woman. It was too blurry at that distance to see her face clearly, but there was no doubt in Shaw's mind that it was Martine.

The footage was timestamped just under 2 hours after Shaw received Root's last transmission.

"Can the Machine track their movements after that?", Shaw asked with more hope than she had felt all day; she knew the ambulance was their only lead at the moment, and perhaps the best one they had gotten so far. She had to believe that this would lead them somewhere.

"Not exactly. We can track it to a shopping center north of the city, but it hasn't moved from there sense."

"So, we've got nothing."

"Well we know they're north of the city", Reese offered, "and we know that they know we're looking for them, so they won't be using any of their usual safe houses in that area. So Finch ran a check of all residences and business owned by Decima and it's counterparts."

"Of which there are _dozens_. I've told Mr. Reese and Mr. Fusco that it's nearly impossible for me to narrow down the list without more information with which to conduct my search."

"And we've told _you_, Glasses, that we've got no more information for you and there's no way for the three of us to search all of those damn buildings before you're down a team member."

Fusco stood up, anger clear on his face, and Shaw wondered if he had always cared about Root - despite his many jokes about her mental stability - or if this is something new developing in response to the happenings of the past 24 hours. Of course, when Fusco stood up and took a step towards Finch Reese felt he had to intervene as Shaw just stood and looked on, standing between them as the two men started to bicker. She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to ignore her frustrated teammates, who's arguing was threatening to turn her headache into a full blown migraine.

Shaw thought back to her dream, trying to remember every detail because Root had seemed so alive and so _real_, so _there_, even when her fingers had gone through her, and she needed to remember Root like that and not think of what she could _actually _be right now.

So Shaw thought of her smile, the one that Shaw knew was just for her regardless of how little she wanted to believe that, warm and inviting beyond reason. And her voice, lilting and sing-songy, honey sweet even when viscous, always hinting at secrets without having to say anything about them. Even the way she smelled; like coconut and gunpowder, two of Shaw's favorite things at once.

Shaw thought back to the way Root had reached up in her dream to pull cascading brown curls away from her long neck, the muscles in her forearm tensing just under the skin and making the few scars there dance with the movement. Root tapped the scar just behind her right ear, the scar Shaw had known to be the result of a shoddy stapedectomy when she had first seen it without Root having to explain it to her; Shaw remembered when Root had broken into her apartment, for the tenth time in as many weeks, and how she was so prepared to shoot the hacker without remorse until the saw the blood soaking through the arm of her jacket and running down her neck. Silently she sutured a still-shaking Root, who only spoke to thank her with a small smile as Shaw left to get some pain killers. How mad Shaw had been when she had come back and seen that the hacker had gone out through the open window in her living room and down the fire escape to who knows where - she had convinced herself at the time that the anger stemmed from the fact that Root had broken in _again _and that she had left the window open upon her departure despite the freezing temperatures that night, but she knew now that there might be much more to it than that. It might not have been anger at all, she was coming to realize, but instead a heavy worry that sat on her chest.

A toned down emotion similar to the one that was consuming her now.

_I love it when you play doctor_, Root had said the next time Shaw had patched her up, leaning in too close and earning one of the ex-agent's better glares in response. Shaw had thought she was foolish for getting the implant in the first place when an earpiece seemed to do the job in a much less permanent way, but there was no coming between Root and her precious Machine by then.

_Wait_, Shaw thought, snapping her eyes open.

Her subconscious had already told her the answer to their questions as she slept. She just needed to listen - just as Root had told her to in her dream.

_The implant._

"Finch", she practically shouted, interrupting whatever he had been in the middle of saying to Reese and a still-fuming Fusco. "I think I know how we can find Root."

* * *

It took close to thirty minutes for Finch to find the information he needed, but when he did they finally had something useful.

The implant Root had did not return to her the ability to fully hear outside stimuli in her right ear (which they all agreed was not her first priority anyways); it instead offered her a direct link to the Machine through a small chip that could create an internet connection off of surrounding wireless and cell signals. Even nearby bluetooth could be picked up by the chip, and turned into a working connection directly to the Machine. The chip also encrypted the signals as it hijacked them, making the process virtually untraceable. Even by Samaritan.

At the time he had integrated it with the cochlear implant Root had provided, Finch was unaware of the extent of the microchip's abilities. He would never admit it to Root herself, but he had his doubts that day about what it was the chip could even _do_. After looking in to it however, and finding an article highlighting the specifics of the chip and how it - the only one of it's kind - was stolen from the Nirushima Center for Technological Advancement (a center owned by none other than Decima Technologies), Finch was able to develop a code containing an algorithm that would be able to reverse the polarity of the waves it used.

Effectively leading them directly to Root's location without giving anything away to Samaritan.

"It might take several hours for this to find Ms. Groves", Harold explained to an impatient Shaw, who was determined to prepare for their assault regardless, "but as soon as it does we should have a location for her, accurate within 10 feet."

Shaw was hardly listening as she loaded her nano, checking the safety before putting it in her borrowed holster with some extra clips. She also loaded the M9 she had stolen from the Decima agent and stuffed it in the waistband of her jeans, strangely comforted by the cool metal against her lower back. Reese walked over to her, and she was prepared for a lecture, but instead he threw a kevlar vest at her and began to load his own guns; she grinned at him before slipping the vest on and securing the velcro straps on either side. He mirrored her action and secured his own vest, and Shaw didn't even complain when he double checked her's for her.

"It's not tight enough", he murmured at her when she lost her patience and swatted his hands away from her side, where he was trying to adjust it for her.

"If you so much as _imply _that I don't know how to wear a vest I will give you a matching bruise on the _other _side of your jaw."

Finch quietly observed their banter as they suited up, knowing it was useless to argue with them. They were preparing to rescue a member of their team who had gone through hell and back and all in the course of a single day - of all the times for them to be overzealous, he supposed this was not the worst.

(He even kept his mouth shut when Shaw strapped an _excessively _large ceramic knife to her thigh with a grin that could only be described as devilish, and when Reese secured several grenades to his belt.)

"We're just going to head north", Reese said to Finch before he could ask where the two of them were going. "We know that they're going to be north of the city, and with traffic there's no telling how long it's going to take us to get there. Just let us know when you have that location."

Still knowing better than to argue, he simply nodded and extended the hand holding the car keys out to the two ex-agents - Reese snatched them before Shaw, just barely, and she muttered to herself all the way up the stairs.

"Please be careful", Harold said like a prayer after they had left.

Shaw was upset that Reese got to drive Finch's new Mercedes, but busied herself by double and triple checking the magazines to her guns. The vest Reese had gotten her was heavy but familiar, reminding her of her days in the Marine Corps. Absently, she rubbed at the tattoo on her forearm. Reese picked up on the action, and knew it to be one of Shaw's very few (if not her only) nervous habits.

"Are you going to answer my question?", he asked cautiously as they pulled up to a red light; the traffic wasn't as bad as he had feared but much worse than he had hoped, and he knew it was going to take them longer than expected to get out of the city.

Shaw looked over at him disinterestedly, still running her fingers over the caduceus on her arm.

"And which question would that be again?"

"Are you okay?"

She looked away from him then, pulling her hand away from her tattoo and instead busied herself by pulling at the stray strings coming off the velcro strap securing her knife to her thigh. It dug into her a little uncomfortably in this position - it certainly wasn't made to accommodate sitting - but she just used that to distract her from Reese even further.

"You don't have to answer", Reese offered for her as if she was considering answering in the first place. "I know what it's like. I remember when I thought I lost Carter - before I _knew_ that I had lost her. I was ready to take down every and any thing that stood between me getting to her. You, Root, Fusco, Zoe, even Finch. I didn't care what you all had to say or what help you had to offer because when it came down to it, I felt that it was all my fault and therefore my mess to clean up."

He heard the cocking of a gun, and took his eyes off the road for a second. He was met with the muzzle of Shaw's fully loaded nano, her dark eyes boring into him from behind it.

"I _did_ tell you I would shoot you if you brought this up again, Reese. I'm _not _having this conversation."

Undeterred, he continued - Reese knew that Shaw needed him to help her save Root, at the very least, so she would wait until after that to shoot him. Knowing her, she wouldn't have any bullets left by that point anyways.

"You have to know that it isn't your fault. Whatever happens, whatever we find, you have to accept that."

"You're saying that like you think she's dead."

Reese stole another quick glance in his passenger's direction; her gun was still raised but it had dropped slightly, and her eyes were no longer watching him, but looking out ahead of them and watching the cars they rushed past. He knew suddenly that Shaw had more belief in finding Root's body than finding her alive; he knew from experience that that belief would make her reckless, even more so than she already had been, and would put not only all of them in danger, but Root as well if Shaw didn't curb that fear.

"I don't. I really don't. And you can't, either. Because you are a soldier, with or without the uniform, just like I am. So I need you to remember what that means, and to turn whatever you have going on in your head into focus. She can't afford for you to fall apart this close to the end Shaw."

Shaw gulped, partly because Reese was right, and partly because she was scared and didn't want to admit it. She had faced down literal armies, had killed terrorist and destroyed men in ways both physical and emotional and felt no fear before nor remorse afterwards. Now she knew why Cole had always prayed before every mission.

She wished she believed in God, because she would pray now.

They drove in silence after that. The traffic slowed their progress considerably, but they finally made it out of the city limits and pulled to a stop at a small gas station no less than an hour after leaving the subway. Reese went in and got coffee for them, which Shaw only accepted to warm her freezing fingertips, and the two of them sat there watching cars pull in and out without so much as a single word to each other. Shaw watched men fill up their trucks, women with screaming children fill up their minivans, some teenagers pay off a wandering bum to buy them cigarettes.

Life was going on outside of the car like the world _wasn't _ending, and that made Shaw angry. The world had been ending since late the day before, she wanted to tell all of them, when Shaw tripped on a puddle of blood in an abandoned apartment building and learned in that moment and every moment after just how long a fire could burn.

Her's was still burning.

What felt like hours had passed, but only twenty minutes after they had arrived Finch called Reese.

"I'm sending the GPS coordinates, and a blue print of the building", Finch told them hastily, and Shaw could hear him typing away. "It's an old port authority building on the water; Decima doesn't own it, but the owner works in their security department."

Reese punched the coordinates into his phone and didn't even wait for them to load completely before starting the car and heading east towards the water. Shaw reviewed the blue prints Finch had sent them, setting her jaw as she developed a plan for infiltrating the building.

"You better tell her we're coming", Shaw said quietly. Reese could barely hear her, but realized that she wasn't talking to him before he asked her to repeat herself; Shaw was talking to the Machine, if you could call a one-sided conversation filled with demands talking. "You had better tell her that I'm coming for her."

* * *

Her throat was too raw to scream out again, so as the amphetamine hit her system and coursed through her veins in a painful way, all she could do was sob. Marine had the audacity to laugh as the held the emptied syringe just before Root's unfocused eyes.

"That's the last one", the Decima agent said with genuine remorse in her voice. "I hope it was as good for you as it was for me."

With that she sauntered over towards the small table holding all the empty needs - _Forty six in all_, the Machine counted for her,_ Chance of survival 21.8%_ \- and dumped them unceremoniously into a trashcan. Jeremy, who had been sitting off to the side watching with a disgusting glint in his eye, looked at Martine with a faux pout.

"No more, then? What a shame. I was really enjoying the show."

Root bit back bile rising in her throat just long enough to watch the two of them walk away talking excitedly amongst themselves; she turned her head to the side and emptied her already empty stomach onto the floor. She continued to sob then, overtaken by a hopelessness she had never felt before. It was a miracle she had survived this long, she knew, but she was beginning to wish that she hadn't even made it to this point.

There was no way she would be able to tell Martine where the Machine was, nor could Finch or Shaw or Reese or anyone else, so what was it that she was suffering for? Just delaying the inevitable, she assumed. She wondered if this could be considered a 'good end' and thought back to her conversation with Harold so long ago. If only Root had given Shaw the message she had wanted Harold to give her then, or on any of the days that followed - it seemed to be the least of her concerns at this point, bleeding out and full of drugs with no end in sight short of death, but she still regretted being too cowardly to bring it up to Shaw herself.

What would I say now if I had the chance?, she wondered. I love you, she thought she should start with, but decided against it; Shaw would recoil at that, at the sudden outburst and the emotion behind it. I think we would be good together, she settled on, because it was sincere but lacking the passion of the word 'love'. And then she would kiss her before Shaw could answer, like she had thought about doing so many times before.

The Machine interrupted Root's hypothetical with more statistics on her health, and she let out a short laugh at that. Even at a time like this, the Machine was nothing short of reliable with it's information.

_Chance of survival 47.9%, _She then said, catching Root's attention - how could her chance of survival be going _up _even as she felt herself slowly getting even weaker, even before Jeremy had gotten his shot at her?

_Chance of survival, 49.3%_, She said mere seconds later. Root was now confused, and afraid that there was something incredibly wrong with her reliable God.

"How?", Root dared to ask just above a whisper. She looked up with still blurry vision to make sure that none of the Decima agents had heard her; thankfully, the lackeys that had been in the room with her and Martine were starting to pack things up in preparation of leaving and paying her no attention, and Martine and Jeremy were much too far away to hear anything she was saying.

Suddenly her implant replayed to her the sweetest thing she had heard in hours, in _days_, in quite possibly her entire life - Shaw's voice, gruff and tired and Root almost smiled because she could tell just from the way she sounded that she hadn't eaten in who knows how long.

"You had better tell her that I'm coming for her", Shaw's voice filled her head.

_They will come_, the Machine said again just after, and for the first time since all of this had started, Root believed Her.


	6. Chapter 6

Holy crap. So I've been on deployment for approx ~forever now and am currently posting this (short, ish) chapter from South Korea. South Korea! Who ever thought I would be here in a hotel room on a port call posting fanfiction? Definitely not me. Anyways, it hasn't been proof read and I am back out to sea in a few days so it'll be a while before I can update again. Hopefully this one is good enough to hold you guys over while I'm out there getting sea sick and sleeping 3 hours a night. Much love to you all!

* * *

The port authority building, which Finch informed them had been vacant since the late 1950's, was a two story brick warehouse right on the water with large pane windows that housed more plywood than glass. It had been owned by the family of one of Decima's lead security guards for generations, through several name changes, effectively allowing the company to use it as a shell for their undoubtedly more shady ministrations without leaving a paper trail for the Machine to trace. The team might have been able to find it without tracing Root's implant, but it would have taken weeks to narrow it down to this particular location from the literal hundreds that it could have been.

Shaw would have surely destroyed everything in her path if it had come to that.

(She still might.)

John pulled their borrowed Mercedes to a stop a little more than a block away, where he and Shaw popped the trunk and prepared to further arm themselves for their assault.

Reese, being more so practical than he was brash, simply chose to add an additional pistol to the one he had taken from the subway and the grenades on his belt. After he finished securing his small personal arsenal he looked up at Shaw, who was trying to figure out how to carry an AT4 anti-tank weapon in addition to her nano, her stolen M9, and the AR-15 she had already slung over her shoulder by the strap. John reached a hand out and took the rocket launcher from her, placing it back in the trunk and shutting it before she could grab it again. She huffed at him, blowing errant strands of her usually secured ponytail off of her face, and it reminded Reese of Bear when one of his toys were taken away from him.

"What the _hell_, Reese?"

He looked her up and down before extending an extra clip for the M9 to her; Shaw accepted it but avoided his gaze to instead turn her attention to loading the rifle magazine after storing his gifted clip on her belt with all the others. She snapped the magazine into the AR-15 and caught his weary gaze with an eyebrow raised.

"Well?", she asked when he still didn't answer.

"I think we've got enough firepower, Shaw. But if it makes you feel better, you can take some of this leftover C4 from when you decided to blow up that house in suburbia."

"There's no such thing as too much fire power", she said without hesitation, mirroring what Root had said to her when she walked out of the subway with six guns yesterday morning, then added after a beat, "but I'm taking that C4."

They slowly ascended a hill 100 feet or so away, just to the west of the port authority building, and laid prone amidst several bushes at the peak. Shaw pulled out a set of binoculars and started to asses the scene - there were two black unmarked SUVs parked outside the building, surely Decima's, and several armed men guarding the outside. Two stood by the main door at the south side of the building, with one at the smaller back door and two others roving the perimeter. It would be difficult, and require a fair amount of timing, but if they could set it up the right way they could - in theory - slip in after one roving guard passed the back door and before the second rounded the corner, incapacitate the guard standing there, then get inside. Of course, when the second rover turned the corner he would notice that the door was now unguarded, which would lead him to alert every agent both outside and inside the building, as well as however many may be in the immediate area, that something was wrong. Thus tipping them all off, and effectively ruining the point of attempting to sneak inside. As well as effectively ruining any chance they had if making it out of the warehouse alive, and with Root.

She handed the binoculars to Reese, who accepted them and spent a minute or so watching the routine of the guards, just as Shaw had done.

"There's no way to get in undetected", he said out loud, even though he knew that Shaw had come to the same conclusion.

"I noticed", she confirmed, "but it's okay. Because I had a _plan_."

"A plan?", Reese asked cautiously as he watched her rise slowly, getting into a crouching position and pulling the AR-15 from her back. "Am I going to like this plan?"

She checked the magazine of her rifle one last time and flicked the safety off before raising the scope to her eye to look down it and towards the building.

"No."

Shaw licked a finger, mostly for show (regardless of the fact that Reese was markedly unamused by her antics), and held it up to try to asses the wind. It wasn't blowing much at all considering that they were so close to the water, and though it had been a long time since she had tried to line up a shot like this without a sniper rifle and a spotter, or at least Cole on the other side of the line to give her a little guidance, she had no doubt that she would be able to hit her mark; she had excellent motivation, after all.

The AR-15 has a maximum effective range of 600 yards, she repeated in her head like a prayer, and suddenly recalled every little aspect of the weapon she had learned inside and out during her days as a Marine. The scope read the distance from her to her target as just under 100 yards.

This shot was the beginning of the end, the show that would initiate their assault - the first shot of many that would bring them all closer to Root.

This shot had to be _perfect_.

"Should I _maybe_ prepare to charge the building?"

Without looking down at him she smirked, squeezing the trigger just slightly to relieve some of the tension as she lined up a shot with the knee of the guard at the back door.

"Yes", she said just before she pulled the trigger.

Time moved quickly then, with Reese and Shaw taking off to run down the hill with their pistols drawn before the shot had hit its mark - which it did, perfectly, much to Shaw's chagrin. The guard hit the ground, yelling and clutching at his shattered knee, and attracted the attention of the two roving guards. They ran towards the yelling and were so busy attending to him that they noticed the two agents too late, and earned each of themselves a shot to the knee of their own. Reese motioned for Shaw to go towards the front doors following one side of the building while he took the other, using only hand signals they had both thought were long forgotten, and they rounded their respective corners at the same time - the guards here were ready for them, however, and Shaw earned a shot to the middle of her vest before Reese could take them both out. The wind was knocked out of her, and she knew she would have a blooming bruise in the middle of her sternum later, but thanks to the vest she was mostly uninjured. Reese ran up to her after kicking the guards' pistols out of their reach, but she simply shook her head at him and accepted the hand he offered to help her up.

"Way to get shot before we even get inside, Shaw."

"Shut up. I was _distracting_ them", she rasped out a little roughly, still out of breath and rubbing absently at the back of her head where it had smacked the pavement, "so that you could take them out."

He smirked and made a noncommittal noise before moving towards the door. Shaw pouted but followed him. She stopped him just outside the door however, grabbing the sleeve of his suit jacket a little tougher than she had meant to. He spun around, confused, and caught her nervous eyes on him - it was not a look he saw on Shaw's face very often, if ever, and it was not something that looked good on her.

"John, if something happens in there...", she trailed off, looking away suddenly.

What was she supposed to say here? She was smart enough to know that this moment was important, to know that in the movies she would say something powerful and moving that would dissolve all the female viewers to tears, that it would be the crescendo of a song or the climax of some great story, but she still had no words on her tongue to explain exactly what it was she was feeling.

She was always better with actions than words, always a show don't tell kind of person, but in a situation where Root might only have her words to remember her by what was she supposed to say?

She gulped.

"You tell her everything, okay? You tell her that I fucking fought tooth and nail to get her and she had better not waste it."

John looked at her skeptically, knowing that whatever it was that Shaw wanted to say to Root surely had more to it than that. But he knew that Shaw was trying - it was evident in the pink flush of her cheeks, not from the cold or their short fire fight outside like she would argue if he asked her, but surely from her embarrassment.

"But it won't come to that", Reese replied a beat later, nodding.

"You promise me you'll get her out of here if-"

"We'll _all_ get here out of here, Shaw", he interrupted with a hand extended as if he meant to grab her shoulder - he thought better of it in the end, letting it awkwardly drop back down to his side. "No one gets left behind."

"Reese, don't make me say it alright? Just make up something heroic or some shit, maybe romant-"

Shaw stopped herself and shook her head, feeling foolish before trying again.

"Can we just not do this right now? Just nod your big head and promise me that no matter what, you'll get her out of here. If you have to leave me behind, then leave me behind, I just want- I _need_ you to leave me."

"I need you to get her out of here", she added after a beat, and if her voice wavered slightly neither her or John acknowledged it. "I need you to make sure she gets to live her life after this, and that she's safe, and I can not _believe_ that I am saying this right now but that she's fucking happy for once. Okay?"

She stormed past him to the front doors of the building without allowing him to respond, knowing that John would argue the fact with her until the end if he had the chance to. So she didn't give him the chance, taking his stunned silence as a reverent vow, as an agreement and a promise.

She felt she owed Root so much, and if the worst happened to occur in this old building, then she wanted to make sure she at least got this. Got these words. And she prayed Root would understand what wasn't said, but filled the spaces between each and every syllable.

"Are we gonna do this or what?", Shaw threw over her shoulder with feigned annoyance as she raised her nano with one hand and reached for the heavy door with the other.

He nodded dumbly even though he couldn't see his partner, not sure what to add, and mirrored her with his own pistol drawn.

The inside of the building was much like the outside; old and unkempt, it was musty smelling from years of sitting by the sea, and parts of the concrete floor where mottled with holes. It seemed they took out all of the guards before they had a chance to alert whoever was inside, as there was no welcoming party in the office-type receiving area they entered. Beyond that, through another set of heavy doors, was the warehouse portion - surely, Shaw thought and knew Reese was thinking the same, that was where they would encounter the fire fight she was itching so badly for.

Shaw holstered her pistol and swung the rifle around off of her back. She checked the magazine that was inserted and her extras as John did the same for his drawn pistol. They nodded resolutely at each other before opening the doors and heading inside.

The warehouse was mostly barren, with all of its contents set up rather strategically in the back across from them. Reese saw the red dot on Shaw before she noticed it, and kicked her feet out from under her before hitting the deck as well. Before she could even protest they were met with gunfire from behind the crates. Quickly, each of them scrambled to a heavy concrete support beam for cover.

"Stop trying to get shot!", Reese yelled to Shaw from his pillar, no closer than 20 feet away.

Chips of concrete sprayed around her as she sent him one of her better glares in lieu of a verbal response. Knowing this game well, she waited patiently as she counted bullets as best she could, knowing a pause indicating a reload would come soon. The second it did, Shaw liberally sprayed the wooden crates hiding a shooter with bullets, and John followed suit with a grenade lobbed in the same direction. She and Reese waited for the explosion, which set off to the left of the boxes and sent pieces of wood and Decima agent flying towards the back wall. Shaw waiting for the finality of it all sliding towards the floor and guns clattering to the ground - which they did, loudly - before charging forward.

They made quick work of the three remaining guards, one of which was already injured rather badly by one of Shaw's bullets. John took precise shots to the knees of the last two, hiding rather ineffectively behind another wooden crate that was easily cut through by his pistol.

After dragging all of the men out of sight Reese proceeded towards the only other door in the room, a small rusty door with a seemingly brand new cipher lock installed, leading further back, while Shaw stopped at the body of one of the guards. Though it appeared as if he would bleed out rather soon from the grouping of bullets in his lower abdomen and legs, she didn't hesitate to swiftly put a bullet between his eyes when his hand twitched in vain towards his weapon.

"I'll be taking that", she said for deaf ears as she removed the red dot sight from his AR-15 and attached it to her own. "How do these clowns get all the good toys?"

John shrugged noncommittally at her with a small smile - even in a situation like this, Shaw could be nothing but true to herself.

"Didn't you think there would be more of them?", Reese asked as Shaw flanked the other side of the door. He looked over at her with confusion on his face. "I thought they would put up more of a fight."

"It's entirely possible that they really didn't think we would find them. Knowing Martine's ego, it's not like that's a stretch."

Shaw looked back at him with a hint of doubt in her eyes, reconsidering her words.

"Finch?", she asked as she tapped her earpiece to open up a line. He answered instantaneously, as he always does, his voice a little tinny and if at all a little worried. "Can you pull up those blue prints for the port authority building again?"

Reese raised an eyebrow but didn't interrupt as they both heard frantic tapping through the line.

"Nothing appears out of the ordinary, Ms. Shaw. Short of what appears to be some major erosion in the main room that was reported a few years ago, nothing has changed in that building since the late 70's."

"Erosion?", Reese questioned. He shook his head, and suddenly a thought came to him. "Finch, can you cross reference the location of that supposed erosion with the sewer layout for the city? I've got a feeling it may be less 'natural decay' and more 'effective entrance for illegal activities'."

"Just a moment, Mr. Reese." More typing filled both his and Shaw's ears as Harold browsed and hacked his way to the answer, followed rather shortly afterwards with a triumphant '_aha_'. "Mr. Reese, that hole lays directly on top of a relatively new sewer tunnel that runs directly from Manhattan. It was built several years ago, but never officially put into used due to what is listed as 'permit issues'."

Shaw groaned, knowing that all that really meant for them was that they had no way of realistically knowing what was on the other side of that door; they had no way of knowing how many agents were there or had access to the space, they had no way of know what kind of defenses were waiting for them, and they now had no way to guarantee that if they stormed in, Martine and her lackeys wouldn't just scoop Root up and take her throw the tunnels to some other terrible location.

"Whatever!", Shaw said out loud, pulling Reese from his conversation with Finch. "I don't care, I really don't fucking care. We made it this far. I'm going in."

Shaw then took a step back and squared herself in front of the door, carefully aiming her rifle at the cipher lock with her sights set on attempting to blow the thing off in a fit of pure frustration. She had gotten this far, had gotten this close to saving Root, and she was not about to let something as ridiculous as a tunnel full of a possibly unlimited number of well-armed, highly-trained Decima agents stand in her way.

Nothing could stop her now.

Luckily (for both her and Reese's sake), John stepped in and lowered her gun before she could risk killing either of them with a ricochet bullet.

"You know, Shaw, I did give you a _much_ more effective gift earlier."

She raised her eyebrow at him in confusion, trying to figure out how her borrowed vest was going to blow this fucking door open. Just then, Reese pointed down at her belt where most of her arsenal was hanging; she followed his hand to the gift he was referring to, and couldn't stop the almost evil grin that spread.

He was pointing to the C4 secured to her waist.


	7. Chapter 7

Reese helped Shaw make quick work of applying the C4 to the door, an admittedly nervous energy running through her as she set the detonator in place and walked around the opposite side of a large beam to avoid the impending blast. When it happened, louder than she expected as it always was, the two ex-agents shared a sideways glance before leaving their respective safe locations and heading towards their impromptu doorway with their weapons drawn as if it was second nature by this point (and if they were being honest, it probably was). The door was effectively blown open, pieces of mortar and scorched metal strewn about the small space where it once stood; as they walked a little closer, the dust began to settle just enough so that they could just barely make out the sheen of buffed linoleum floors and clean white walls.

"So", Reese drawled out as they crossed the threshold from the decrepit warehouse and into the clearly newly built hallway, waving to clear the air, "it looks like Decima has put some work into this place after all."

Shaw grunted in response, choosing to instead focus all of her attention on taking in her new surroundings. There was no doubt Decima had done a lot of work there since they began using the warehouse, as if the new cipher lock wasn't indication enough. The entire back portion of the warehouse had seemingly been transformed into some sort of Decima facility; off of the long hallway the two agents found themselves in, there were several doors on either side. While passing one, Shaw looked in and saw flashing blue lights she knew all too well to be indicative of computer servers.

("Why is it so bright in here?", she had asked Root one day while attempting to stealthily snoop through the hacker's safe houses. Root had only invited Shaw at the smaller woman's insistence; she was convinced that Root didn't even have a safe house, and the thought of Root not having a single item to call her own unsettled Shaw for a reason she either couldn't find or admit to herself. Inside there was simply a mattress on the floor, a dresser against the far wall that Shaw was unaware was filled with guns and magazines and not a single shred of clothing, and rows upon rows of computer servers, blinking out of time and putting out more heat than Shaw knew could be comfortable, even in the frigid winter temperatures. Root only offered her a noncommittal noise from the closet where she was stuffing what few articles of clothing she had into a bag to prepare for whatever insane mission the Machine had planned for her next.

Root was off to Syria, or so she had told Shaw earlier that evening. '_I could use some warmer weather_', she said with a wink to the agent's protests.

"How can you even sleep with all these lights on?", Shaw tried again, trying to hide the sound of opening a drawer - a drawer that housed nothing but a tangle of wires and one half-empty bottle of bourbon. She closed it a little rougher than she meant to, frustrated by not being able to find anything interesting. After thinking on it for half a second, she opened the drawer back up and took out the bottle. "And all this fucking noise. It's like you're sleeping inside of an actual computer."

Root sauntered out just then, a duffle bag on her shoulder and her signature coy smile on her face. She brushed by Shaw's shoulder, rubbing lightly against her forearm and leaving a wild fire in her wake, which Shaw responded to by distracting herself with a large gulp of the bourbon.

Shaw struggled to swallow against the burn as she turned on a heel to follow Root out of the apartment.

"Maybe that's why I like it so much, Sameen.")

"Computers?", Reese asked Shaw after sauntering up beside her, as if he needed any confirmation.

She simply nodded at him without a glance and continued down the hallway.

"It's too quiet", Reese tried again. He was clearly a little on edge; no one would believe that he got a little chatty when he was nervous, but Shaw knew all of his tells as if they were her own by this point. Unfortunately, she was in no mood to indulge him; not being this close to Root. Not with this much on the line.

"It's a big warehouse. And this hallway has been soundproofed… probably because of all the noise those damn computers are making."

Reese noted that Shaw wasn't wrong; there were countless servers in the rooms coming off of the hallway, and in addition to raising the overall temperature of the space at least 10 degrees, they filled the small area with a relatively loud humming noise.

"If they've got her here," Shaw added, "she'll be in the back. Now shut up and follow me."

John looked a little jilted, but nodded resolutely and let his partner take the lead. She lead them down the remainder of the long hallway, past several more rooms of servers, to a dead end. Just as they came to it, Harold opened a line and quickly muttered 'go left' at them before disconnecting it just as fast. They went left as directed and through a set of large double doors where two large Decima agents were sitting at a fold out table and enjoying what had to be dinner by this point (or was is breakfast? Shaw had long ago lost track of what time it was). The pair sat up, obviously caught off guard, and reached for their weapons – one of them even still had the chopsticks held awkwardly between his fingers as he picked up his pistol, but neither of them moved nearly fast enough. They were kneecapped before they even had the chance to aim their weapons.

The room that Finch had lead them to appeared to be a lounge of sorts; it was small, with a counter and fridge in addition to the table and chairs (and the two Decima agents on the floor). Upon further inspection, Shaw found several Tupperware containers filled with food – they were even labelled. Reese looked over her shoulder and actually laughed.

"You could almost believe this was just a regular day job for these guys."

"It is for us", Shaw responded flatly. Reese didn't relent; he was even still grinning when Shaw shot him a look. "There's for food… what? 15, maybe 20 guys in here? And we've taken out at least 10."

"So we _might_ just have a few agents between us and Root."

Shaw was about to respond when a name on a container at the back of the fridge caught her eye; it looked like lasagna, not the homemade kind but the Stouffer's microwavable variety. She reached in and pulled it out – reading the name with a grimace, she straightened and shoved it in John's chest roughly.

"Maybe. But that one's mine."

Just when he was about to ask how Shaw could be thinking about eating some poor schmuck's leftovers at a time like this, he read the name scrawled on the post it note stuck to it.

_Martine_.

After tying the Decima agent's in the lounge together, the two would-be rescuers made their way through the only other door in the room. It lead them to another hallway, much smaller than the one that had brought them to the lounge previously. In this hallway there were only two doors – one on either side. Shaw and Reese both froze once they heard voices wafting through the space. Through one of the doors was the voice that Shaw was waiting to hear – Martine's – while through the other the soft murmuring of none other than Jeremy Lambert could be heard.

"I've got Martine. You take care of Lambert."

"On three?"

"I'm not going to countdown for you again, John. We move, _now_. If they realize that we're here before we make our move, there's no telling what will happen to Root."

Reese acquiesced, but placed a hand in front of Shaw to stop her from charging in right away. She looked at the hand as if she was ready to blow it off, but didn't say anything.

"No survivors, Shaw."

"I wasn't aware that was up for debate", she said through an evil grin.

John and Sameen broke off then, each making their way to their respective doors. Shaw took one last breath before raising her pistol defiantly, setting her jaw, and kicking the door open. (She heard John kick in the door on the other side of the hallway just a split second later, but at the time things moved much too fast for her to pay attention to what he actually found behind door #2.)

What Shaw stumbled in to, to her chagrin, appeared to be a meeting for all the remaining agents on the compound. There were 5 agents sitting at a round table with Martine at the head of the table, on the opposite side of the room, and the entire half dozen of them looked up at Shaw with nothing short of terror when she kicked the door open.

The agent closest to her, a burly man that surely would have given her a run for her money if he hadn't indeed been the unlucky bastard within 5 feet of her, caught the first bullet between his eyes before he could even stand. Two of the agents flipped the large table in an instant, and used it as cover for themselves and for their boss. Shaw quickly spun behind a row of filing cabinets close to the door, moving just a beat too slow to avoid a bullet to her upper arm. She had enough adrenaline running through her to not feel at, at least.

"What a pleasant surprise", Martine yelled out above the gunfire. Shaw could hear the smirk in her voice, and it made her tighten her grip on her pistol even tighter. She ducked out quickly and caught one of the uncovered agents in center mass with several rounds.

"Like I said, Martine. You have something that belongs to me."

When she heard nothing but a laugh in response, Shaw dared to stick her head up and earned the hot graze of a bullet to her left temple.

Too close, she thought as she dropped as quickly as the bullet had come and gone. Way too close.

"You had better hurry than, Sameen. Before our dear Jeremy gets a shot at her."

With a growl, Shaw fired the last of her pistol rounds in to another agent that attempted to creep around the other side of the cabinets. That was three down and two to go, not including the apparently unarmed Martine hiding behind the table.

Shaw liked those odds.

Without wasting another second, she pulled her last flash grenade off of her belt and aimed it at the wall behind the makeshift cover – it had its intended effect, hitting the wall then falling to the ground just behind Martine and the agents, who all yelled out when it went off. It gave Shaw just enough time to sprint out from behind the cabinets and spray the area with her AR-15. She heard two of the bodies drop, but kept her weapon raised as she worked her way around the table.

Martine had been shot – none fatally, Shaw noticed with a grin – in the leg. The force of the round had pushed her back against the wall, where she still stood.

"Just kill me", she spat at Shaw. "Get it over with. I'm sure Jeremy has already taken care of our little friend."

"Oh, I'm going to kill you alright." To Martine's surprise, Shaw threw her rifle aside. Then her empty pistol, and her grenade belt. She even took off the Kevlar vest she was wearing, adding it to the small armory now piled up off to the side of the now destroyed room. "But I'm going to do it with my hands."

Not giving the taller woman the chance to process what she had said, Shaw launched herself at her in the same breath she had spoken the sentence. She landed several solid hits to her jaw before Martine was able to deflect her and deal her own damage. After avoiding what would have surely been a devastating blow, she thrust her palm up and in to Shaw's unguarded nose, surely breaking it, and used the momentum of her doubling over in pain to deliver a knee to her abdomen. She was relentless, though, now more than ever – she could practically see Root like she was the light at the end of a tunnel, could hear her lilting voice in her ear and feel her warm flesh beneath her calloused fingers, and it all drove her on with more force and determination than she had ever felt before – and was up and swinging before she had even caught her breath again.

Shaw was an excellent fighter, practically an expert on hand to hand combat, but Martine had size on her. It made for a much more evenly matched fight than Shaw wanted to admit. The impromptu boxing match went on for almost 15 minutes before both woman were starting to get run down.

It was in that moment – her nose bleeding, her ribs throbbing, the bullet wound she sustained earlier causing the muscles in her dominant arm to lock up – it hit Shaw.

She didn't _have_ to fight fair. And why should she? It wasn't as if Martine had in any moment before this one, and this one could hardly count. It wasn't as if the Decima agent had much of a choice in the matter this time.

"You know", she said as her and Martine circled each other, both out of breath, "I have been looking forward to this moment since you blew my cover."

"What a coincidence. So have I."

"There's no way you're getting out of here alive."

"I was about to say the same to you."

With what appeared to be the very last vestiges of her energy, Martine lunged herself at Shaw with what could only be described as a battle cry. Shaw was prepared for it, however, was expecting it even, and at the last second, she pulled the ceramic knife from her thigh and let Martine use her own momentum to drive herself on to it. The force of her attack had broken Shaw's frontal bone – she could feel the snap of the bone above her eye, vaguely registered the pain it caused – but it also drove the knife straight through Martine's sternum and no doubt serrated at the very least one of her lungs.

With a gasp, the Decima agent fell in to a heap on the floor. Shaw unceremoniously lent down and pulled the knife from her chest.

"You'd be surprised how many people _live_ with that sort of injury", she said as she wiped the blood off of the knife and on to the front of her shirt. "But that isn't something I am willing to risk. Not this time."

Martine tried to argue, tried to protest – or at least, that's what Shaw assumed she was trying to say, though it was mostly gurgling – but Shaw wasn't hearing any of it. Was there a chance that Martine really could survive from the stab wound she had just sustained? Perhaps. It was a small chance, a very small chance considering the fact that help was either not coming or would be much too late, but it was too much of a chance for Shaw to take.

"If your God can hear this, I hope it knows: you won't get away with this. None of you will."

With that, Shaw slid the tip of the knife across Martine's throat. It took only seconds for her to bleed out then, in combination from that and the chest wound, but Shaw made sure the Decima agent was dead before she retrieved her rifle from the pile in the corner – she left the vest and the now empty pistols and grenade vest, seeing no need for them now – and left in search of her partner.

She needn't look far, of course; the door on the other side of the room was labelled eerily 'Interrogation', and was a large room divided with chain link fences and curtains to make it several smaller rooms. Shaw followed the gunfire to the furthest small room, where John was holding Jeremy Lambert, in nothing but his underwear and a pair of socks, on his knees with Reese's pistol pushed roughly to his temple. Stepping over the bodies of several agents, all dead as opposed to kneecapped like she expected (John may have said 'no survivors', but she honestly wasn't sure if he meant it until that moment), she made her way through the maze to him.

"Do I want to know?"

He looked up at her – his nose appeared to be broken too, and he was bleeding from the neck where a bullet had grazed him (luckily, nowhere near the carotid) – with steel in his eyes.

"Root is in that room", he said, but stopped Shaw from rushing in right away. "But you need to know that Mr. Lambert here was in the process of boasting to his friends about what he was going to do to her as he took off his pants when I walked in."

It took Shaw a moment to process what he had said, and what he was trying to imply – she had a one track mind sometimes, after all, and all tracks lead to Root at this point – but once he did she understood why he stopped her.

He was offering him to her, to kill as she pleased. John knew that Lambert had to die, even without what the deranged man had been planning to do to Root, but with that knowledge in hand he wanted to give Shaw the opportunity to deliver the justice as she saw fit.

Leaning down, Shaw took Lambert's chin between her thumb and pointer finger – roughly – and forced him to look her in the eyes.

"There's a special place in hell for people like you. Make your peace."

With that, Shaw stood back up.

"Make it hurt, Reese", was all she said to her partner before taking off in the direction he had indicated Root to be in.

Once she found her, however, all the adrenaline rushed out through her feet. She froze in the doorway of the small room, sanctioned off by chain-link fence and devoid of anything but a sink in the corner, a surgical tray that had been knocked over, and the chair where Root herself was.

Shaw had literally jumped out of, in to, and through fires, explosions, and hails of gunfire with more conviction than she felt now looking at Root. The hacker's body was a road map of Martine's torture - of bullet holes poorly stitched, of burn marks and scratches, of dark bruises and needle marks. Her head hung, unconscious, and her hair - matted to her head with sweat and dried blood around her left temple and ear where a large blow went untreated - curtained her face off from Shaw's view.

"Root?", Shaw asked quietly from the doorway, far too quietly to actually rouse her.

She crossed the room in an almost sprint, stepping over instruments, syringes, weapons and what she could only assume were instruments of torture at some point in order to reach the other woman. Slowly, and as gently as she could with hands that she couldn't remember ever shaking this badly in her life, she cupped Root's chin and tilted her head back. As the hair fell from her face Root's eyes opened, unfocused, and Shaw could see her straining against the lights and through her pain to see who she was.

"Root", Shaw said again, straining to speak just a little louder than she had before, "it's me. It's Shaw."

"I'm here", she added as she pulled the still blood stained ceramic knife from her thigh and began to carefully cut the zip ties off of her wrists. For the first time it really hit Shaw how exposed Root was, in nothing but her underwear in the florescent lighting of the cage; she removed her jacket and placed it gently over shaking shoulders, mindful of the injuries it was covering. "You're going to be okay. We're going to get you out of here."

Suddenly her eyes gained some focus and cleared enough for her to see the owner of the hands touching her, more gently then she'd been touched since being pulled from the apartment building who knows how many hours ago now.

"There's no way you're Shaw", Root croaked out. "She's never this nice to me."

Shaw almost cried at the sound of her voice, hoarse and pained and still telling bad jokes at worse times, but there. Root was alive, and Shaw had never heard something as beautiful as her name tumbling from those cracked lips.

"Yeah, well. It's a special occasion. And you're a little underdressed for this party, so how about I take you home?"

"You've been trying to get me to go home with you for months", Root joked with a small laugh that quickly dissolved to a cough. Blood trickled from the corner of her split lips, and she brought a trembling hand up to wipe it away.

"How about we save the flirting for when you're not bleeding internally?"

"You're no fun."

Glad that Root had at least enough presence of mind to go back and forth with her, Shaw slid an arm under her knees and used the other to pull Root's weak arms over her shoulder. Carefully Shaw hoisted her up into a bridal carry - Root was light, deceptively so, considering how tall she was, and Shaw was able to carry her with relative ease. Root sucked in a breath quickly while Shaw was shifting the hacker's weight around between small steps to make her more comfortable; Shaw assumed it was an intake indicating she was in pain, so she stilled herself.

"I'm okay", Root said quietly when she sensed they had stopped. "I mean, I'm not. I'm pretty sure I'm dying. But I would really like to get out of here."

She dropped her head unceremoniously onto Shaw's shoulder, exhausted.

"I have never been so thankful to know a doctor", Root mumbled into the soft fabric of Shaw's shirt. She felt as if at any moment she could wake up from whatever dream she was living now, but couldn't find it within herself to keep her eyes open. Breathing in whatever it was Shaw was wearing - something musky and earthy yet not masculine, tinged with the scent of gunpowder - Root thought that if this was a dream she would rather not wake up.

"And a hot doctor at that", she added almost as an afterthought.

Shaw swallowed thickly when Root let her nose accidentally brush against her neck. After the emotional rollercoaster of the last 24 hours, Shaw could just cry with the knowledge that Root was with her, in her arms, being taken away from the place Martine had tortured her. It didn't hurt at all that Martine herself was dead in the room adjacent – Shaw decided to not tell Harold that she had killed her, and would urge John to do the same about Lambert when she saw him next. Not yet, at least. She had enough lectures from Harold, and Shaw would rather bask in the light of Root's rescue than rush back in to feeling like a chastised school girl again.

"I should probably start charging you", Shaw responded a beat too late for it to be natural as she started off towards the exit once more. "I'll accept most insurances."

Root hummed sleepily into Shaw's shoulder, and Shaw picked up her pace just slightly as she felt the hacker's grip begin to slacken.

"I knew you'd come for me, Shaw."

"Because your machine told you?"

"She didn't need to", Root murmured, and seconds later unconsciousness claimed her.


	8. Chapter 8

John sped out of the warehouse to retrieve something from the car (refusing to say what, despite his partner's ardent protests against spending any more time than necessary inside the building), leaving Shaw behind in the lounge where she carefully set Root on the table. She was still unconscious, and her poorly sutured abdomen had begun to bleed again when she was hoisted up from the interrogation room. Looking around, Shaw's eyes fell on the two Decima agents that were still tied together and just as unconscious as Root; she used her knife to cut long strips from their pants and undershirts, making impromptu bandages.

They were shoddy at best, just barely long enough to be secured together around Root's admittedly narrow waist, but they would do. They would have to.

With the bandages in place and not much else she could do, Shaw resorted to pacing the small room. Every few seconds her eyes darted to the door, expecting John to replace them every time. Just when Shaw was ready to forget about her partner all together and make her own exit he burst through the double doors, out of breath and with a duffle bag in his hand. She eyed him cautiously.

"I'm assuming you don't have a change of clothes in that goody bag."

He looked down at himself - his suit was in tatters, what was left of it blood soaked - but shook his head.

"More like a way to take care of that tunnel before Decima has the chance to use it to sneak up on us."

"Oh", Shaw said with a small grin, "that'll work, too."

Following the blue prints Finch had sent them prior to their assault, the two of them left Root in the relative safety of the lounge to make their way to where the tunnel most likely was. Shaw was reluctant (they had just gotten her back, after all; she hesitated to let Root out of her sight) but John argued that he would need her help. With quite a bit of convincing done on his part, she eventually acquiesced. They found their destination rather easily - seeing as Decima seemingly didn't plan on anyone finding the warehouse, it was even clearly marked. Large bright signs reading "Tunnel Entrance" were scattered about, helpful as ever. They even had arrows.

Reese set the bag down once they arrived at their destination, which upon a little reconnaissance indeed lead down to the tunnel. Shaw peered over his shoulder as he opened it.

It was filled with sticks of dynamite. And a lot of them.

"Reese", she stared, dragging it out just enough to let him know she was both annoyed and impressed, "is there a reason you have a metric _fuck__ton_ of dynamite in a duffle bag?"

He shrugged.

"Remember that case I was working the other morning?" John gestured towards the bag when his partner nodded. "I may or may not have borrowed this from those guys. I was going to add it to our rainy day fund, but..."

(He was referring, of course, to the small arsenal that the team had accumulated through the years and was currently being housed in Harold's safe house. It included, but was not at all limited to: 14 M9 pistols, 13 AR15s,13 M16 assault rifles, 8 Remington 870 combat shotguns, 8 Bizon Submachine Guns, 7 XM148 grenade launchers, 4 AT4 anti-tank weapons, 3 PF-98 rocket launchers, 3 Kalekalip KNT-308 .308 caliber sniper rifles, 2 of Shaw's coveted H&amp;K USP Compacts, a single military-grade taser (which was confiscated from Root, before she got any bright ideas), not to mention countless boxes of ammunition, grenades, scopes, gun attachments, field first aid kids, Kevlar vests, eye and ear protection, and knives of all shapes and sizes.)

"Seems like a rainy enough day to me."

John just grinned, his swollen nose and fat lip making it so comical that Shaw grinned back.

The two of them worked in tandem, using the blueprints (and several helpful hints from Finch, who appeared to be quite the demolition expert) to strategically set the sticks of dynamite around the heavy doorframe and along the stop of the stairs, to ensure the cave-in they desired. With half the bag set up, John ran the wire. They retreated as far as it would allow, far enough away that the explosion shouldn't affect them (other than being ridiculously loud, of course). John's only warning to Shaw about the impending blast was a quick _'cover your ears_' before he detonated the lot. Not that covering them did much; they were still ringing terribly when she was finally able to hear again at all.

It had worked, though - it would take Decima, or anyone, hours if not days to get through all the rubble. And there was no telling how much damage was done to the tunnel itself. When Samaritan and by extension Greer learned what had happened and inevitably sent its agents after them, they wouldn't be able to use the tunnel to their advantage. Satisfied, the pair made their way back to the lounge.

Shaw carried Root out of the warehouse, and a good portion of the way to the hill where her and Reese had stashed their borrowed Mercedes. However the adrenaline finally left her body about half of the way up, the bullet she had earned to her upper arm earlier causing it to lock up, making it nearly impossible to continue. Reluctantly, she let John take over. He traded Root for the duffle bag, and gingerly carried the hacker the rest of the way to the car, where he deposited her in to the back seat; he even tried to make her comfortable, her long legs bent at an awkward angle to keep her on the narrow seat, but it wasn't as if Root could appreciate his efforts. She was still unconscious, wrapped tightly in Shaw's leather jacket and the few make-shift bandages Shaw had salvaged from the clothing of the Decima agents.

She looked, Reese noted with a small grimace, terrible. They would need to hurry.

After draping a thin wool blanket over Root he turned around to make sure Shaw was still behind him, and found her putting the dynamite in the trunk and pulling out the anti-tank weapon she had been so insistent on bringing with them earlier. That same one that, before their assault of the warehouse, he had to pluck carefully from Shaw's small shoulders and convince her to leave behind.

"_Shaw_?", John asked in a clipped voice, but received nothing but silence from his partner. While she may not have said anything, her eyes burned with a vengeance that he knew too well. He took a step towards her before speaking again. "What are you planning on doing with that?"

"Making sure Decima _definitely_ can't follow us."

She was already loading the weapon as she spoke, and as much as Reese wanted to give Decima a full refund on the havoc they had wrought in their lives in the past 24 hours alone, he didn't see any advantage to giving them a minute more of their time. At least not right that second, with Root in the shape she was in. They had already long overstayed their welcome by taking the time they did to rid Decima of the tunnel. While John thought that it was a necessity, it still took longer than either of them had or he feared Root could afford. The three of them were working off of pure luck at that point, and he was becoming increasingly fearful that it was about to run out.

"You don't think Root has waited long enough for medical attention?", he tried. John thought a logical approach might coerce her, but realized how wrong he was the second he opened his mouth and was on the receiving end of a rather deadly glare. Even by Shaw's standards.

There probably wasn't anything he could say to her to convince her to just let it go. At least for right now. At least until they could regroup. But still, he pressed on.

"Isn't that why we took out the tunnel, Shaw? There's no way they're going to follow us. There aren't even cameras out here, there isn't a single camera for _miles_. But we need to move _now_, before they try to get ahold of Martine or Jeremy, can't, and send an army here to investigate."

Still unconvinced, his partner avoided looking at him.

"We can't take down an _army_, Shaw", John said as he rubbed at his eyes absently. "Not like this."

His partner slowed her movements but didn't stop. John sighed, exasperated at how stubborn she was being though he was hardly surprised.

If he was being honest, in addition to the fact that every second they spent arguing was a second Decima got closer, and the fact that Root was in such poor shape, he was just plain _tired_. Knowing that Shaw would no doubt never let him live it down if he voiced that, though, he kept his mouth shut. But still, his entire body hurt, and Reese wouldn't hesitate to admit (to anyone but Shaw) that he was more than ready for a hot shower and a cold beer. If he could even keep his eyes open long enough to put the bottle to his lips.

His partner, however, was still checking her weapon as if there wasn't a storm of epic proportions heading their way. As if she hadn't been awake for who knows how many hours, and wasn't in terribly great shape herself.

"Everything we just did for Root won't be worth anything if we never make it back to the city."

"You're probably right", Shaw tossed over one shoulder even as she raised the AT4 to the other and took aim, "but if I'm going to leave Greer and Decima with one thing, it's going to be knowing that we will - that _I_ will - destroy them and every single thing they own."

"They'll think twice about taking something of mine again", she added with finality.

With that, she fired off the first round, hitting the middle of the three SUVs parked outside and sending all of them up in a fiery explosion. When the smoke cleared enough for her to lock on to another target, she quickly reloaded and sent a second projectile into the warehouse itself. Reese could see the faint vestiges of a smirk on her face as already crumbling brick collapsed and a spray of concrete and plywood rained down on the destroyed vehicles.

Some things required a scalpel, Reese recalled with a frown, but Shaw was nothing short of a sledgehammer.

Or perhaps a grenade.

Her penchant for absolute chaos satisfied (for the time being), Shaw climbed in to the back seat of the Mercedes with Root as John sped away, back towards the safety (and much needed medical equipment) of the subway. She cursed herself for not thinking to bring any of those supplies with her - Root went in to cardiac arrest three times on the drive back, Shaw contorting her body impossibly to administer CPR and restart the hacker's damaged heart. On their arrival to the subway station, Finch met them at the foot of the stairs, wide-eyed and thankfully wise enough to save his lectures for later. Or never, Shaw hoped. He had Lionel with him, who looked rather green when he spotted Root's crumpled body in John's arms.

"Should we perhaps find you all a doctor?", Finch asked with a shaky voice as the pair walked past, a trail of blood (a combination of all three of theirs) behind them.

"I _am_ a doctor", Shaw deadpanned at him before speeding by them both, Reese on her heels and Bear on his.

Harold had decided against arguing, knowing that it would get them nowhere. Instead he retreated to the subway car. At least there he could make himself useful, continuing his research on Samaritan and Decima and leaving his two assets to their task. Fusco, who had been standing idly by and looking ill since Shaw and Reese walked in, finally spoke up.

"Jesus", he muttered as he eyed them seriously. "What happened to you guys?

Shaw spared just under half a second on how the three of them must look to Fusco and Finch. She was covered in blood (half hers and more than likely half Martine's, with a large smear across her front from where she had wiped the blade of her knife clean on her shirt), with her arm hanging uselessly at her side. She could feel the bullet lodged somewhere in her bicep, wiggling its way deeper into her muscle every time she so much as breathed in too deeply. Her eye, which she had almost forgotten had taken that heavy blow from Martine, was swollen so much that at any moment she feared she would stop being able to see out of it. Reese wasn't in much better shape; the graze on his neck had finally stopped bleeding, but the multiple large lacerations he sustained from Shaw could only guess was some sort of knife fight would require stitches, and soon. Non-medically speaking, his suit was more or less shredded. Both of the former agents' noses were contorted rather painfully, clearly broken and in need of being reset. They looked like half of a bar fight gone wrong. And certainly not the winning half.

Root looked the worst out of the trifecta, as one would expect. The blow she had taken to the head at some point, as well as the three gunshot wounds to her abdomen, were already showing the early signs of infection. She was burning up, in and out of consciousness and speaking incoherently while awake. Shaw held the first two fingers of her good hand against the hacker's wrist, and found her pulse rapid and irregular. Root was covered from head to toe in blood, bruises, small cuts, needle marks, and burns, not to mention that almost all of her fingers had been broken and her left foot appeared to be nothing short of crushed.

Shaw stood still for just a moment, ignoring John's protests and Finch's lingering presence (not to mention Fusco's worried eyes), feeling the soft, warm flesh that gave way ever so slightly beneath her fingers. She focused on the pulse beating traitorously against her, like it was rebelling by existing at all.

And it was, in a way.

She stood there reveling in the fact that this was _real_, that Root was really _there_, that they really _saved_ her, until she felt her heartbeat slow dangerously. Only then did she jump into action, and slip in to the familiar and comfortable disassociation that was brought on by recalling her years of medical training.

John moved quickly despite his injuries, responding to her commands instantly. He set Root up on the gurney in the back of the subway, in the small room Shaw had designated as their personal triage station after her cover had been blown and Finch tasked her out of fear she might actually go insane with nothing to do.

(That was after Shaw had set up an indoor shooting range in the space, somehow acquiring a dozen mannequins from one of the shops in Chinatown and setting them up at varying distances in the back room.

On more than one occasion Finch had come to the subway in search of some quiet - a break from reading poorly written papers or giving lectures that no one was listening to - only to find it filled with gunfire. It was almost amusing, for a short while; Shaw quickly grew bored of shooting the faceless plaster molds scattered about, and took to dressing them in ridiculous outfits. Root's coveted bear costume had ended up on one, while another wore a baggy suit of indiscernible origin with John's face taped to the head.

She even had one in a pants suit, a blurry surveillance camera photo of Control secured to it.

He put an end to the target practice when he found one of the mannequins wearing his favorite fedora, several high caliber rounds through it. Shaw just grinned through his rant, eventually agreeing to convert the room in to something a little more practical.)

Getting to work immediately, Shaw grit her teeth through the pain that came with moving her arm and hooked Root up to the multiple monitors she had acquired. Reese helped her start IV lines, and Fusco (who finally stopped looking like they were all about to revisit his lunch at any moment) gathered supplies as Shaw shouted them out to no one in particular.

Though the gunshot wounds were bad, and there was no telling what kind of damage they had done when they tore through Root - there were three entry wounds but only one exit, causing concern for a completely different set of reasons -, not to mention the large blow to her temple, Shaw's number one priority was flushing the other woman's body of all the toxins that had been introduced to it. There would be no point it trying to operate now if her heart couldn't stay beating. She tasked John with setting up saline, in addition to the broad-spectrum antibiotics and 2 units of blood that were already hanging, and he completed his task quickly before looking back up at Shaw with cloudy eyes. Not liking the way he looked - pale and sweating, swaying ever so slightly on his feet - Shaw just scowled at him.

"Don't you _dare_ pass out in this room", she snapped at him as she secured the multiple IV lines with gauze tape, the words coming out much harsher than she had meant to. "Go get yourself some blood. _Now_."

Reese, knowing better than to argue, dipped out of the room and quickly set himself up with an IV of his own, which he brought back and hung on the rack with all of Root's bags before carefully maneuvering his way around the gurney to hook Shaw up to the other unit in his hand.

How ridiculous it must look, Shaw though, that both of the people fighting to save Root's life are hooked up to IVs with her.

John and Lionel stepped out after everything they could do had been completed (Reese was unable to go far, obviously, so he stood awkwardly just outside holding his arm in the doorway to avoid tangling his IV line), so that Shaw could strip Root down and place her in a hospital gown. She inserted a catheter, attached an EKG machine, pushed just enough painkillers to keep Root comfortable but coherent, then sterilized the operating area, the tools she intended to use, Root, and her own hands.

She also pulled out a large bottle of whiskey from a supply cabinet, already half finished, and took a large swig of it, hoping the alcohol would quell the shaking in her hands.

Satisfied, Shaw called Reese and Fusco back in. Once inside, however, it became clear to the boys that Shaw was at a loss for what to do next. They had no anesthesia, no respirator, barely any of the tools she needed, and Shaw didn't dare try to operate without a single one of those things at this point. If there was any hope of saving Root's life, Shaw would need to put her under, remove the bullets in her abdomen, repair the damage they had done, thoroughly clean the wound at her temple, reset the bones of her foot, as well as take care of half a dozen other serious injuries. Shaw was also not foolhardy enough to believe that flushing Root's system was enough to repair the damage done to her already weakened heart by the repeated torture; though she hoped it wouldn't come to it, Shaw knew that having a pacemaker on standby wouldn't be a terrible idea.

Knowing that there really was no other option, she tasked Finch with locating all of the equipment she would need - which he did, rather quickly, taking the list Shaw had supplied and sending Detective Fusco out to meet Zoe and collect everything. With Root's vitals somewhat stable (or, as stable as they could be; Shaw was just happy that her heart hadn't stopped beating again), Shaw walked out in to the main room if the subway. Reese was sitting in a chair pulled up close to the doorway, looking a little bit better than he had been before. He glanced at Shaw and flashed her a weak smile - his nose was a nasty shade of purple, upper lip bisected by a cut that would probably need a stitch or two in it. But still, he smiled at her, so she tried to return the gesture.

It hurt to do so, and not because of her matching broken nose or shattered frontal bone.

(Though, if she was being honest, that didn't help at all; she made a mental note to hook both of them up with some painkillers when she felt like moving again.)

"How's she doing?", Reese croaked out as she got nearer to him.

In lieu of a response, Shaw slumped down on to the floor between his chair and the door. She leaned her head back against the cool wall and closed her eyes, enjoying the way it felt against the nasty bump she had earned there at some point. Unsure if John could see her (and not caring much if he could or not), she shrugged with a nonchalance she didn't feel. Shaw suddenly wished that she had brought the bottle of whiskey out with her.

"She's alive."

She could feel John shift, felt the IV line dangling above her head dip and touch her.

"Which is a good thing."

All Shaw could do was grunt, not trusting her voice. She didn't know how to explain to him what she was feeling. As relieved that she was that Root was with them, that she was safe from Martine and her torture and Jeremy fucking Lambert and whatever else Decima had planned for her, she couldn't shake the sinking feeling she felt in the pit of her stomach ever since they brought her back. Whatever it was, it made her guts twist and the hair on the back of her neck stand up. It was not a feeling she was familiar with. It was not something she had ever felt before with such ferocity.

Somewhere deep inside of her, so far down that she could barely acknowledge it let alone admit it out loud, Shaw thought it might be fear.

"Does she know?", John asked quietly.

She was pulled from her thoughts, and considered playing dumb, but was too exhausted to try. Shaw shrugged again, and dropped her head in to her hands, resting her elbows on her knees. The weight and movement hurt her arm, but she relished in the pain; it was grounding. It was a distraction. It made all of this more real, and whatever she was feeling for Root less so. For the time being, at least.

"You should tell her", he added once he realized that her half of the conversation was over.

John decided on leaving out that he knew how she must feel - it wasn't all that long ago that he was holding Carter's lifeless body and regretting every chance he missed to tell her how he felt. It might not have changed anything in the end, but it would have had to have been better than walking around with all of that still so heavy on his heart.

He wouldn't wish that on anyone. Least of all Shaw.

Frustrated, Shaw silently scrambled to her feet, leaving a still distracted John to sit by the doorway and listen to the monitors beat semirhythmically in the other room. She retrieved a handful of painkillers from the triage room, as well as some small forceps, instant ice bags, and several suture kits, before making her way back to her partner.

"Why don't you make yourself useful?", she grunted as she tossed the supplies in his lap. Reese looked at them blankly as Shaw retrieved a chair, which she pulled up next to his; she turned it around, though, making sure that she could see Root. It just made everything much more convenient that it offered up the side she had been shot on.

"You know I'm not a doctor, right? That's kind if your gig."

"I just need you to get this bullet out of my arm." When John still looked hesitant, she rolled her eyes. "I can't fix your lip or anything else wrong with you _or_ Root if I can't move my arm, Reese."

Though clearly still reluctant, John sighed and motioned for her to scoot closer. She did so, rolling up the sleeve of her shirt so that he could get better access to the bullet hole about 3 inches above her elbow. Reese knew just how painful being shot there could be, and wondered how Shaw had managed to move as much as she did and as well as she did.

John remembered Carter's lifeless body and all the havoc he had caused in the wake of her death, regardless of how much pain he had been in, and had his answer.

He positioned the forceps in one hand while steadying Shaw's arm with the other. John hesitated before beginning, however, his very small amount of medical experience combined with the fact that he was painfully aware that Shaw hadn't so much as taken a Tylenol since they arrived at the subway making him a little nervous.

"Do you maybe want to... bite down on something?"

"Don't be a pussy", she said casually, but immediately regretted it once he got started.

All the finesse John had with a weapon was completely gone when you put forceps in his hand instead. It felt to Shaw as if he was actually doing more damage than actually doing anything even remotely repairative. After what felt like a lifetime (but was in reality no more than 5 minutes), he finally extracted the bullet from where it had settled near her humerus. He placed it in her upturned palm, where she examined it momentarily before dropping it to the ground as if it had been nothing more than a mild inconvenience to her. Shaw moved her arm at various angles and in to several positions, still terribly sore but satisfied that the damage was actually quite minor. Reese then made quick work of the stitches; now those, Shaw noted, he had clearly done before. They weren't perfect, of course, but not everyone had gone to medical school. At least the scar wouldn't be too unsightly.

(Not that that bothered her overtly much.)

"Now", Shaw said after admiring his handiwork for a moment, "you're going to reset my nose."

"Shaw, I don't think I-"

"Shut up", she interrupted, popping a few of the painkillers she had grabbed into her mouth. She shook a few into John's hand too. "If you do it, I'll reset yours for you, and you might come out of this without looking much uglier than you already are. If you don't do it, my nose is going to heal _badly_. And if my nose heals badly, I'm going to _shoot_ you. Because I have a _very_ nice nose."

John just looked at her helplessly - any medical experience he had picked up during his time with the army was limited at best. At worst, it could actually end up being detrimental. He could do decent sutures and wasn't half bad at basic damage control, but anything beyond that was better left to the professionals. Shaw couldn't reset her own nose, however, just as she couldn't remove the bullet from her own arm. He knew he didn't have much of a choice but to try to follow her directions and do the best he could.

At that thought, Reese gulped. Whether or not her agreed with Shaw's statement about her apparently nice nose, he certainly didn't want to be the reason it came out of this looking any different.

"Okay", he acquiesced. Not that Shaw was really going to give him much of a choice. "Just tell me what to do."

When Finch, Lionel, and Zoe rushed in to the subway an hour later - their tactfully acquired medical supplies in tow - they found the two agents leaning against the doorway to Root's room holding ice packs to their faces. Shaw actually had one in each hand; one held gingerly against her nose and the other pressed against her eye to slow the swelling. After a few botched attempts, Reese managed to reset Shaw's nose to her satisfaction. In return she reset his, as well as sutured up the worst of the lacerations he had received. With fresh bags of blood hanging for each of them, some mild painkillers in their systems, and the worst of their injuries tended to, the pair looked infinitely better than the last time Finch and Fusco had seen them.

Zoe, however, who had not seen either of them since the previous day when she dropped them off after Shaw had burnt down that house in suburbia, just gawked at the sight of them.

"Oh my _god_", she gasped as she rushed towards John, slumped in his chair by the doorway, "John, are you okay?"

His cheeks and ears turned a deep red, but he allowed Zoe's fussing. It was only when he looked over and caught Shaw's eyebrow raised in amusement that he gently took her hands in his. They had a silent conversation, something passing between them that left John still red, and Zoe much calmer. Shaw looked away - as did Finch and Fusco - while it happened, feeling for some reason as if she was intruding on a private moment.

"So did you get everything we needed, Fusco?", John finally said to break up the awkwardness that had descended on the group. He still held one of Zoe's hands, absently running his thumb across her knuckles while her free hand rested gently on the back of his neck.

(Shaw wondered, momentarily, if that was how she and Root would be if she was ever brave enough to tell her how she felt, let alone intelligent enough to find a way to put it in to words. Or lucky enough to have Root reciprocate it.

Looking at how comfortable the couple next to her was - John leaning back ever so slightly into Zoe's touch, Zoe standing so close to him that her side was pressed against his - she tried to picture her and Root being the same way. It was difficult, if not impossible. And not because she didn't crave that physical closeness with Root - because she did, in that form and every form - but because the two of them... they were different. So different from John and Zoe and how they act together. So different from everyone, really.

She could see them fighting over breakfast, see herself having to remind Root to eat and Root remind her to slow down, could see Root burning her pancakes and herself feeling guilty for blowing up about it. She could envision the way they would take up space together, not as affectionate outwardly as the two next to her but still affectionate in their own way. Shaw could imagine the way Root would look sprawled across the couch in her apartment, typing away on her laptop as Shaw sat on the floor with her back against the cushions cleaning her guns on the coffee table. She could imagine the way Root would pause every so often from whatever it was she was doing to simply touch Shaw's shoulder or watch her work for a few minutes, how Shaw herself would force a scowl out of habit in contrary to the warmth it would spread in her chest.

Shaw could practically feel Root's soft curls between her fingers, could hear the lilt of her voice as she made innuendos and comments every time Shaw dared to touch her outside the safety of her bed. Of _their_ bed.

At that thought, Shaw decided to snap her attention back to the conversation at hand. If anything was counterproductive at this point, it was in any way, shape, or form imagining Root in her bed.)

"We got it all", Fusco said, providing just the distraction Shaw needed. "If you guys can't fix Cocoa Puffs with all this crap, I don't know how anyone'll be able to do it."

Standing up slowly as to not make herself dizzy, Shaw brushed the dirt off her ass. The others looked at her expectantly, knowing that what happened next – the surgery, the recovery, the aftermath, the revenge – all hinged on Shaw. And Shaw knew it too. Looking back at them, the fear and anxiety in their eyes mirrored in her own, she made a decision.

If she could pull this off, if she could save Root's life, then there was something out there that wanted her to tell her exactly how she felt. Whether that was the God her mother worshiped, or the mechanical one that Root did, who was Sameen Shaw to go against its will?

_If Root lives, she gets all of me._

_And if she doesn't_, Shaw thought, _I will drag Samaritan's destruction out until it doesn't hurt anymore._

"Let's do this."


End file.
